On Wednesday 27 September 2017, Enock Seth Nyamador wrote: > > Ghana has admin boundaries for districts, 216 of them.[1] > Personally I think it should be available to the public at no cost > or under any copyright since it has been created by a government > agency. From data (mostly shapefiles) I've come across relating > to this, there seems to be no valid metadata about what/who/when > and Ghana's Open data portal[2] doesn't have anything on this > either.
You have not pointed to specific data source for the administrative boundaries (neither the Wikipedia page nor the Ghana data portal seem to contain any - the Wikipedia page only contains images with unclear provenance of the information in them) so i cannot give you any assessment on if whatever data you have is usable. > Taking a look at this [3] and their respective sources as > Wikipedia. My question here isn't this enough to go ahead and > document an import of these districts of Ghana based on Wikipedia > since there already exist data in OSM based on this? No. Content from Wikipedia can be a legally admissible source for mapping in OSM - for example scanned out of copyright maps or illustrations in the public domain created based on data sources equally in the public domain. But there is also a lot of Wikipedia content that cannot be legally used for OSM. In general Wikipedia does not usually care about database rights. If someone draws a map and uploads it to Wikipedia and puts it in the public domain that is accepted there even if the content of the map is traced from Google Maps or other non-open copyrighted sources. For OSM such stuff is not usable as mapping sources though. If you use content from Wikipedia as a source for mapping you should always reference the individual source. Tagging source=wikipedia is not advisable. The general recommendation for administrative boundary data is to contact the government agencies that have such data and ask them for the data and the permission for using it in OSM. This can be both federal agencies or local ones - local agencies are often better sources for accurate information, but this of course depends a lot on the country. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
