On 04/09/18 10:55, James wrote:
The officer confirmed that Rights of Way data was in the public domain for any use.
That's a bad sign, as it indicates that they don't understand UK intellectual property law. They only way that database rights can lapse into the public domain is through the passage of time.
There are two likely rights owners. One is the council. They need to explicitly licence their data base right under the Open Government Licence. Any other licence needs to be approved centrally.
The other is Ordnance Survey. That normally means that any actual map cannot be used, although, if licensed by the council, the narrative description can be used.
Following some more research, I discovered rowmaps.com which has a database of Shropshire's RoW data from 2014. I contacted the owner, Barry, to enquire about this data. He is currently seeking a more up-to-date database for me.
I believe there are concerns that a lot of this data has been lifted from council web sites without getting appropriate licenses. Typically web sites are licensed for personal, non-commercial, use, but OSM requires that the licence permit redistribution, and permit commercial use.
Once I have this data, what would be the best way to make it available in OSM? Is it not considered accurate to directly import the data, or should it be used as a guide for a ground survey?
Given that it is likely that the database rights on the actual coordinates are owned by OS, and you will have to use the narrative descriptions, you are going to have use other sources, and on the ground surveys are always best, to fill in the details. In any case, any import needs to be checked to make sure it is consistent with existing data (e.g. doesn't duplicate it, and is topologically consistent with other features, even if they are not in their true, WGS-84, positions.
Also, what many OSM users are interested in is mapping those public rights of way that the council does not know about, as there is a deadline looming after which only those known to the council will be valid rights of way.
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