(cross-posting from imports-us to talk-us)
On 12/31/2014 1:48 PM, stevea wrote:
That is true, thank you Nathan Proudfoot. For the Union Pacific, I
was disappointed that their web site requires a (UP employee?) login
and password to gain access to their geographic rail data. BNSF seems
a bit better (providing "high level" rail maps at a nationwide
glance), and other railroads are probably somewhere around "you get
what you get," but please do take Nathan's good advice and seek data
directly from a rail entity as a good first strategy for obtaining
track/lead/line/subdivision names, for example.
Paul Norman writes:
In my experience these types of companies seldom provide anything under
a usable license - is this different for US-based rail company databases?
This is a very important consideration; all data
entered into OSM (from such sources) must be ODBL
compatible. As I look at, for example, the BNSF
(carload_map.pdf) file that Nathan Proudfoot
pointed to, it definitely says "© 2011 BNSF
Railway" so this is the sort of source OSM cannot
use to originate data.
However, federal data or data from states where
there are "liberal" public records law (for
example, the California Public Utilities
Commission "Rail Crossing List" listing Primary
Rail Organization as top-level entities and the
names of their subdivision), I believe these
public sourced data origins are perfectly OK as
they originate as public data at the nexus of a
Citizen of that state placing the data into OSM
as a volunteer who has agreed to the Contributor
Terms.
Be careful, everybody. Public data in a "public
record data friendly state"? OK. Copyrighted
data directly from (say) the website of a rail
company? Not OK.
What I'm not quite sure about are federal records
such as FRA records (as I believe Oak Ridge data
are). These would be covered under, say, a FOIA
request, and so are quite similar to the same
nexus argument as state records, only under
federal law, not state law.
Happy New Year,
SteveA
California
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