Well, it turned it to be a lot easier than I was thinking it would be! I
reached out to the contact listed on the Clearing House web site, using the
template in the wiki page, and he replied confirming that we have
permission to use the data. This is the text of the email exchange, and
I've also attached the raw .eml file.
From: Winters, Frank (ITS) frank.wint...@its.ny.gov
Date: July 17, 2020 22:30:24
Subject: RE: Interested in importing the Address Point data from the
Clearing House into OpenStreetMap
To: Skyler Hawthorne o...@dead10ck.com
CC: Coryell, Rodger (ITS) rodger.cory...@its.ny.gov, Fargione, Craig (ITS)
craig.fargi...@its.ny.gov
Hi Skyler, nice to hear form you. We would very much like the SAM address
points to be included in Open Street Map. The permitted use of the points
is quite simple. You may use the points for any lawful purpose. While we do
our best to maintain a comprehensive and accurate set of address points
with our limited resources we know it has shortcomings. See the metadata
for the liability disclaimer.
We generally post quarterly updates to the data set.
Frank Winters
Geographic Information Officer
Office of Information Technology Services
W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus
Bldg. 5 - Floor 1
Albany, NY 12226
518.242.5036 | 518.281.9140 m | frank.wint...@its.ny.gov
-----Original Message-----
From: Skyler Hawthorne <o...@dead10ck.com> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 6:30 PM
To: Winters, Frank (ITS) <frank.wint...@its.ny.gov>
Subject: Interested in importing the Address Point data from the Clearing
House into OpenStreetMap
ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments
or click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails.
Hello Mr Winters,
Thank you for your part in making the GIS data for New York State available
to the public through the Clearing House project!
I am a contributor to the OpenStreetMap project [1], a collaborative open
project to create a global geodata set freely usable by anyone [2].
We respect the IP rights of others and I write to ask if we can use this
data. There does not appear to be any explicit information about the
license under which the data sets in the Cleaning House web site are
distributed. It's unclear what the terms are for its use, and specifically
whether or not it is public domain, and if it is permitted to import into
the OpenStreetMap project and redistribute to the world under an open license.
At the most simple, I would seek a statement like this:
"The New York State GIS Program Office [or the relevant NYS department(s)]
has no objections to geodata derived in part from the GIS Clearing House
data sets being incorporated into the OpenStreetMap project geodata
database and released under a free and open license" [1]
I also ask that whatever statement you are prepared to make can be made
public for information purposes.
Below is a fact sheet. If you would like any more information, I will do my
best to help or can ask our project's License Working Group to get in touch
with you.
Regards,
Skyler Hawthorne
Fact Sheet
[1] The OpenStreetMap project currently has over 750,000 registered
contributors worldwide. Our main website is https://www.openstreetmap.org
[2] We are mandated to make our geodata available in perpetuity under a
free and open licence. We are not allowed to use a commercial license, but
commercial organisations are allowed to use our data under similar terms.
[3] Our data is currently published under the Open Database License 1.0,
https://protect2.fireeye.com/v1/url?k=76761582-2a4eb33f-7674ecb7-000babd9fa3f-f71edf933744da0d&q=1&e=391ef603-5912-439f-b6e4-b8ac749598bd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendatacommons.org%2Flicenses%2Fodbl%2F
[4] Most of our geodata is contributed by individuals. However, we are very
grateful when able to incorporate or derive from other geo-data datasets
where license terms are compatible.
[5] We formally attribute all such sources at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution, using any specific wording
if you request. We also try to provide a link to this page with any extract
of data from our database. However, for reasons of practicality, we do not
require end-users to repeat such attribution since it runs into hundreds.
[6] We also keep a public track of third party data use at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue and usually have a
project page for each dataset, describing how we use it and whether there
are any license restrictions to be aware of.
[7] If you have any specific legal questions, the OpenStreetMap
Foundation's License Working Group can be reached at
le...@osmfoundation.org and will be glad to help.
On July 16, 2020 12:16:19 Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
(By the way, hi, Skyler, and welcome! You've stepped into a difficult
area - most programmers don't realize just how difficult until they've
waded in.
The legal situation in New York is _very_ complicated, because the key
court case that governs GIS data settled out of court before the
underlying issues were resolved. You simply will not ever get a clear
statement about the legalities, because, alas, there was a court case
that left a door open a tiny crack - and then never reached a judgment
because the parties settled on undisclosed terms. The only people who
could actually cut through the weeds at this point would be the Court
of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Copyright litigation is ruinously
expensive, and neither the agencies who would have a purported
interest in the data nor any user has the means to pursue a copyright
case that far.
I've been asked this question enough that it deserves a more
comprehensive answer. I probably will write at greater length over
the weekend and put the results in an OSM diary entry and blog post,
and come back here to link to them.
My personal belief, with which OSM's legal team may or may not agree
(with that said, there's never any certainty in the law!) is that New
York's open government law renders the use of the data pretty much
fair game from the legal perspective.
This data set has a complex history. It was produced because there
were grants offered to prepare a geocoding system for E911 use. The
address points used to support this effort, for the most part, did not
originate in the state's GIS office, but instead were provided by the
counties. The role of NYSGIS was to coordinate the efffort, to pass
grant money through to local governments, and to normalize and adapt
the data, in some cases to anonymize, and to conform the data to
national standards (https://nena.org/). When I've referred on the list
(or in changeset comments, etc.) to county E911 data in New York, I've
ordinarily been talking about exactly this data set.
I use it routinely, but only as a source of address data when I'm
tracing buildings; in my town. It's usable for that when taken with a
grain of salt and backed up with field survey for items that look
questionable (e.g., the addresses of all buildings in a subdivision or
apartment complex sharing a single point). I do field surveys only
afoot, so I'm somewhat limited in how far from home I've been ready to
map, but you can see the results in the general area of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/42.8213/-73.8833. I'm confident
that my use steers clear of copyright issues in any case. I'm making
my own selection of the data with significant revisions, so the
"selection, sequence and arrangement" of the data are not even similar
to what is in the data set. Essentially, all that I extract are bald,
individual facts. To assert that such extraction is a violation of
copyright is to advance a 'mental contamination' theory, and would
disqualify most mappers from ever mapping anything, since it would
effectively mean that if you'd ever seen anything in a commercial data
set, you couldn't map that object even if you verified it
independently. (There are copyright maximalists who have attempted to
advance just that sort of claim. The US pretty much shot them down in
Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340
(1991)
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.>
The solution in the UK and Australia is murkier, and does verge on the
"mental contamination" theory.) Moreover, the purpose of the database
is to enable both governments and NGO's to have access to the
geocoding for emergency response. Asserting copyright against OSM for
use of E911 data would almost certainly be held to go against sound
public policy.
I'm less sanguine than Skyler is about the data quality. I suspect
s/he (the given name doesn't clearly identify a preferred pronoun) has
been looking at urban or suburban areas in counties whose GIS
departments have relatively stable funding. In those situations, yes,
the data are fairly good. There is still a serious conflation issue
that isn't addressed, with respect to buildings whose footprints are
already mapped but do not bear addresses, where the address point may
or may not be in the building footprint. Many address points, too,
get clustered at the entrance of a private or shared driveway, rather
than being on the indivdual dwellings. I seem to recall that at least
one or two of the apartment and townhouse complexes in the general
area of https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/42.83211/-73.89931 had
to have their house numbers collected on foot, because the E911 data
showed all the address points in a single cluster.
In the rural areas, particularly in the counties with tiny
populations, the situation is grimmer. I'm not certain that Schuyler
or Wyoming Counties even would _have_ dedicated GIS departments!
Until relatively recently, when grant money was available to have this
information in GIS systems for E911 use, they mostly were still using
paper maps, often referenced to an unknown datum. (The first job in
dealing with any scanned tax plat is figuring out what coordinate
frame it's using - around here, NAD27 differs from NAD83 by a few tens
of metres.) The address points may be parcel centroids, or building
centroids, or the point where the driveway meets the road, or even
just something that was digitized from a pencil sketch made by an
assessor. Import of this sort of data could well prove to be a
short-term gain but impose a heavy long-term burden; consider the
love-hate relationship that we all have with TIGER. (The import means
that we've got a nearly-filled-in map, a lot of which is of
halfway-decent quality, and we don't have the mappers to have done it
nearly as quickly any other way. Nevertheless, for some years we've
been paying the price in bad data and worse conflation.)
In particular, when I look at the Ulster County data, I find that the
address points are aligned to the building footprints in the county's
database. Wiping my fevered brow, I recall that we had an import of
Ulster County building footprints, and that it did not conform very
well at all to reality in the field.
https://worstofosm.tumblr.com/post/148016716836/in-ulster-county-ny-people-live-in-small-square
Eventually, the entire import was reverted; there was some
consternation, since there were various isolated spots where mappers
had corrected the data, and the initial attempt at reversion did not
go cleanly. (It got fixed.) Mateusz, do I recall that you took part
in the reversion?
While, as Dave suggests, I've been around the block a few times in New
York, I've never attempted an import on the scale of the address
points, and do not plan to unless there's a large team to pursue
conflation and correction. The largest imports of state data I've
done have been public land boundaries - and each of those took a
couple of months of evening work to curate. Even there, the quality of
the job doesn't really satisfy me, but it was enough at least to
convince me that doing nothing would have been worse. (I then wind up
having at least a week of evenings annually dedicated to sporadically
_updating_ the import, and any big import really needs to come with an
update plan!)
So, my advice for both legal and technical reasons would be to use
caution, and recognize that mechanical import is likely to be a
disaster - the data will need to be eyeballed by human beings and
corrected. From the legal standpoint, it would be best to proceed only
with those counties that have granted fairly broad authority to use
their cadastral data. Those include the five boroughs of New York City
(that is, Bronx, Kings, New York, RIchmond and Queens Counties), and
the counties of Cayuga, Chautauqua, Cortland, Erie, Genesee, Greene,
Lewis, Ontario, Orange, Rensselaer, Sullivan, Tioga, Tompkins, Ulster,
Warren and Westchester. In New York City, the job is essentially
done, because there have been massive (and relatively well curated)
imports of the public data from the city's GIS department. I'd
recommend avoiding the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk,
because they've been litigious in the past about their data.
In any case, it's a huge job, and probably needs to be done a block, a
census tract, or at the very most a township at a time. Even to do an
entire county is a relatively daunting task unless you can find the
staff for it. (I'm willing to do my part, but it remains a huge job.)
I've spent far too much time getting this far, but I do want to write
a piece that summarizes how we got where we are with respect to NYS
GIS data. The technology press got rather hysterical about the one
court decision at the time, which in fact said much less than the
press read into it. I'll write that one up separately, as I said.
On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 10:28 AM Adam Franco <adamfra...@gmail.com> wrote:
Skyler, I was able to reach out to Vermont's State GIS office and received
an explicit usage grant that is now recorded in the OSM wiki. While former
similar efforts in NY may have failed in years past, a new request might
succeed in getting a more blanket approval that could cover this and other
OSM projects. In case it help you or others as a starting point, here is
the message I used for Vermont:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Adam Franco <adamfra...@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 4:59 PM
Subject: Vermont/VCGI data usage in OpenStreetMap
To: <leslie.pe...@vermont.gov>
Dear Leslie,
I contacted you about this topic several years ago (2013!) but then shifted
my focus to other projects and never followed up again.
I am a contributor to the OpenStreetMap project [1], a collaborative open
project to create a global geodata set freely usable by anyone [2].
We respect the IP rights of others and I write to ask if we can use data
published by VGCI, in particular [but not necessarily limited to] the
following data-sets:
VTrans::vt-road-centerline
vt-boundaries-all-lines
VT Hydrography Dataset
VT E911 Site Locations
I've read through the VCGI Warranty/Copyright document and while it seems
to my lay reading that importing data from these data-sets into the
OpenStreetMap would constitute a "value-add" and therefore allow such use,
it would be helpful to the community to have a clear statement allowing our
use of the data.
At the most simple, I would seek a statement like this:
"The State of Vermont and its Vermont Center for Geographic Information has
no objections to geodata derived in part from the
VTrans::vt-road-centerline, vt-boundaries-all-lines, VT Hydrography
Dataset, and VT E911 Site Locations data sets being incorporated into the
OpenStreetMap project geodata database and released under a free and open
license" [1]
A broader, less itemized grant might be even better, but I'm not sure if
your agency might have concerns about over-broad usage grants. Maybe
something like this:
"The State of Vermont and its Vermont Center for Geographic Information has
no objections to geodata derived in part from data-sets published by the
VCGI being incorporated into the OpenStreetMap project geodata database and
released under a free and open license"
I also ask that whatever statement you are prepared to make can be made
public for information purposes, posting it to the project's data-source
documentation for others to reference.
Below is a fact sheet. If you would like any more information, I will do my
best to help or can ask our project's License Working Group to get in touch
with you.
Regards, Adam Franco
Fact Sheet
[1] The OpenStreetMap project currently has over 750,000 registered
contributors worldwide. Our main website is http://www.openstreetmap.org
[2] We are mandated to make our geodata available in perpetuity under a
free and open licence. We are not allowed to use a commercial license, but
commercial organisations are allowed to use our data under similar terms.
[3] Our data is currently published under the Open Database License 1.0,
http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
[4] Most of our geodata is contributed by individuals. However, we are very
grateful when able to incorporate or derive from other geo-data datasets
where license terms are compatible.
[5] We formally attribute all such sources at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution, using any specific wording
if you request. We also try to provide a link to this page with any extract
of data from our database. However, for reasons of practicality, we do not
require end-users to repeat such attribution since it runs into hundreds.
[6] We also keep a public track of third party data use at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue and usually have a
project page for each dataset, describing how we use it and whether there
are any license restrictions to be aware of.
[7] If you have any specific legal questions, the OpenStreetMap
Foundation's License Working Group can be reached at
le...@osmfoundation.org and will be glad to help.
And this is what I got back:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Adams, John E. <john.e.ad...@vermont.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 10:34 AM
Subject: RE: Vermont/VCGI data usage in OpenStreetMap
To: adamfra...@gmail.com <adamfra...@gmail.com>
Cc: Pelch, Leslie <leslie.pe...@vermont.gov>, Brown, Ivan
<ivan.br...@vermont.gov>
Hi Adam,
The State of Vermont Center for Geographic Information has no objections to
geodata derived in part from data-sets published by the Vermont Center for
Geographic Information in the Vermont Open Geodata Portal being
incorporated into the OpenStreetMap project geodata database and released
under a free and open license.
Regards,
John
John E. Adams AICP
Director | Vermont Center for Geographic Information
State of Vermont
1 National Life Dr, Deane C. Davis Bldg, 6th Floor | Montpelier, VT 05620-0501
802-522-0172
vcgi.vermont.gov
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https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
--
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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Talk-us-newyork mailing list
talk-us-newy...@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us-newyork
--
Skyler
--- Begin Message ---
Hi Skyler, nice to hear form you. We would very much like the SAM address
points to be included in Open Street Map. The permitted use of the points is
quite simple. You may use the points for any lawful purpose. While we do our
best to maintain a comprehensive and accurate set of address points with our
limited resources we know it has shortcomings. See the metadata for the
liability disclaimer.
We generally post quarterly updates to the data set.
Frank Winters
Geographic Information Officer
Office of Information Technology Services
W. Averell Harriman State Office Campus
Bldg. 5 - Floor 1
Albany, NY 12226
518.242.5036 | 518.281.9140 m | frank.wint...@its.ny.gov
-----Original Message-----
From: Skyler Hawthorne <o...@dead10ck.com>
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2020 6:30 PM
To: Winters, Frank (ITS) <frank.wint...@its.ny.gov>
Subject: Interested in importing the Address Point data from the Clearing House
into OpenStreetMap
ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments or
click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails.
Hello Mr Winters,
Thank you for your part in making the GIS data for New York State available to
the public through the Clearing House project!
I am a contributor to the OpenStreetMap project [1], a collaborative open
project to create a global geodata set freely usable by anyone [2].
We respect the IP rights of others and I write to ask if we can use this data.
There does not appear to be any explicit information about the license under
which the data sets in the Cleaning House web site are distributed. It's
unclear what the terms are for its use, and specifically whether or not it is
public domain, and if it is permitted to import into the OpenStreetMap project
and redistribute to the world under an open license.
At the most simple, I would seek a statement like this:
"The New York State GIS Program Office [or the relevant NYS department(s)] has
no objections to geodata derived in part from the GIS Clearing House data sets
being incorporated into the OpenStreetMap project geodata database and released
under a free and open license" [1]
I also ask that whatever statement you are prepared to make can be made public
for information purposes.
Below is a fact sheet. If you would like any more information, I will do my
best to help or can ask our project's License Working Group to get in touch
with you.
Regards,
Skyler Hawthorne
Fact Sheet
[1] The OpenStreetMap project currently has over 750,000 registered
contributors worldwide. Our main website is https://www.openstreetmap.org
[2] We are mandated to make our geodata available in perpetuity under a free
and open licence. We are not allowed to use a commercial license, but
commercial organisations are allowed to use our data under similar terms.
[3] Our data is currently published under the Open Database License 1.0,
https://protect2.fireeye.com/v1/url?k=76761582-2a4eb33f-7674ecb7-000babd9fa3f-f71edf933744da0d&q=1&e=391ef603-5912-439f-b6e4-b8ac749598bd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.opendatacommons.org%2Flicenses%2Fodbl%2F
[4] Most of our geodata is contributed by individuals. However, we are very
grateful when able to incorporate or derive from other geo-data datasets where
license terms are compatible.
[5] We formally attribute all such sources at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Attribution, using any specific wording if
you request. We also try to provide a link to this page with any extract of
data from our database. However, for reasons of practicality, we do not require
end-users to repeat such attribution since it runs into hundreds.
[6] We also keep a public track of third party data use at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue and usually have a project
page for each dataset, describing how we use it and whether there are any
license restrictions to be aware of.
[7] If you have any specific legal questions, the OpenStreetMap Foundation's
License Working Group can be reached at le...@osmfoundation.org and will be
glad to help.
--
Skyler
--- End Message ---
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