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Open Maps?
Chilltowner asks: "I'm trying to get local (US) maps together for a community project. I want to able to modify and annotate the maps and provide them free to the public, creating a derivative open work. They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date. I've been searching around for maps available in the public domain or under open licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses allowing derivative works. I've looked at the National Atlas, but the maps, though interesting, aren't detailed enough with street information. The topographical and aerial image maps available through that site are from Terraserver, which are copyrighted to Microsoft. Plus, I really just need simple vector road maps, not USGS rasters. I tried looking at the Census Bureau's TIGER line data, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Are there maps available through other agencies (national or international)? Are there Free/Open-Source Software projects that are making use of public data to build street-level maps for free (as in speech) use?"
In this present day and age, you may have officials from HLS or FBI come knocking wondering what on earth you need maps for ...
That'd only give you positional accuracy, which is almost useless. What's needed is attribution for a given segment - what's the address block of the left side? The right? Are the addresses uniformly distributed? Any "even" numbered houses on the "odd" side of the street or vice-versa?
Then there's the type of street, directionality, names and aliases, speed limits, on-street parking, sidewalks left and right, bike-routes left and right, congestion levels (by time of day), max axle weight capability, max height clearance, lane counts (left and right), and other attribution (car-pools only, etc) that'd be relevent.
Positional accuracy of the segments is pretty much worthless by itself. Cool to look at in real time, but only useful in real time... which is stupid ("Look, ma! The map say's we're right HERE! And look, we ARE!")
Good attribution with crap positional accuracy is 1000000 times more useful than perfect position without such attributes, because it enables you to use the map BEFORE you go somewhere.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
He wants maps which are under a Creative-Commons type of copyright licence because he wants to be able to publish derivative works such as annotated or modified versions of the original map . The copyright licences on most existing maps, as used by map24.com, are not compatible with Creative-Commons licences, which prevents him from using them.
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