Google does not make their data available to anyone as far as I know, but the basemap tiles are available to "regular Joe Schmoe" in the same form they are available to us (i.e. you have to get a free API key). We have no contract at all with them.
For ESRI, you have to sign up for an ESRI global account (I think they are free, not certain though). That gives "regular Joe Schmoe" the same data access we get. I would actually say that this works a little easier than OSM for that aspect, since the data is available as shapefiles and other formats. The database synchronization obviously requires ESRI software on the receiving end though (and permission of the uploader, since you connect to their database for the synchronization). We are interested in the tiles being pushed out, not the actual data. Our data, unfortunately, has all sorts of legal landmines that require us to keep track of who we release it to (centerlines being one of the exceptions though). Brett Lord-Castillo Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer St. Louis County Police Office of Emergency Management 14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive Chesterfield, MO 63017 Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407 From: Ian Dees [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2010 10:21 AM To: Lord-Castillo, Brett Cc: [email protected] Openstreetmap Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Brainstorming an Import Tool On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Lord-Castillo, Brett <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Just thought I would add that both the Google and ESRI programs allow for community edits, which we can get back out into our systems. Community BaseMaps even makes the data directly available to end users (potentially with database synchronization, so you can get only edits pushed out to you nightly). None of that is available to "regular Joe Schmoe" (my definition of "community"), though. I'm sure you have a contract in place ESRI that gives you access to the Community Basemaps and a similar contract for Google's setup. These contracts prevent your citizens from using the data in the same way that OSM would allow them to. What we want out of our data upload is a publically available common basemap that provides an equal base to our enterprise applications and to public mashup developers with no mapping experience. What we offer to support that is the work of our 20+ cartographers who have direct access to resources that no one outside their office has access to. When you say a basemap, are you describing the actual data or the images that would be placed behind mashups or enterprise applications?
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