Brendan, I've half attempted contacting a few municipalities, without much success... Knysna, Stellenbosch, Hermanus seems to have outsourced their GIS departments to a private company...
Emailed Joburg municipality and within minutes received an almost threatening email from a private company asking where we (OpenStreetMap) got our "base" mapping data from and letting me know that the company has private contracts with unspecified municipalities and we would not be able to get access to their data. Situation today, is you can get mapping data from many of the municipality, modify it, transform it, hack it up and release it very easily. Civil engineers, estate agents, cartographers / mapping companies, (open source) developers etc are doing this daily... Once the data is under license from a private company, the data likely becomes a walled garden. Pay or stay out and don't think of distributing unless you pay megabucks more and stick to the license agreement. Forget about innovating unless you have very deep pockets. / Grant brendan barrett wrote: > Yeah, but without any details, I don't want to ring any alarm bells or > jump to any conclusions about anything. I perhaps spoke with a lack of > concrete information. That said, it might be worth investigating. > > In the mean time however, judging by the success of the Cape Town and > Durban imports, perhaps we can have a concerted effort to get all > remaining government data that is in the public domain, and keep it on > an FTP or something for import into OSM. > > Does it make sense breaking this up into areas and picking > municipalities off one at a time? Also, does anyone here have any > Directorate contacts? For the next few weeks at least I will perhaps > not get too much done, but this is something i'd like to get involved > in anyhow. West Coast is going to be my next target. > > Regards, > Brendan > _______________________________________________ Talk-ZA mailing list Talk-ZA@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-za
