OSM to help mapping properties for better florest organization

General talk
1

Hi,

I live in Portugal and this year Fire season burned more area and kill more people than ever.
One of the major reasons is bad rural forest organization. The Government try along the years register all forest properties, but with low success.

My Question: Can I use OpenStreetMaps.org to start and help a crowd campaign to help higher rate of registered forest properties?

The idea is to use Social Networks to promote this initiative and OpenStreetMaps.org for properties mapping and registration. As OpenStreetMaps is OpenData all information can help everyone and is a good start to a better rural territory organization.

Use of OpenStreetmaps for this propose, makes sense ?

Kind regards,
Paulo Sérgio

2

If you want to capture all forests in Portugal this makes sense. I assume there are missing a lot of forests?
Keep in mind that OSM is no register for personal data.

Unfortunately only aerial imagery before the fire season is provided by Bing, ESRI etc. for mapping with OSM. Maybe you have better sources?

Have a a look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Tasking_Manager
Maybe you get support by the portuguese Tasking Manager instance.

Good luck!

3

I think the mapping of forests, and buildings within them, would be encouraged.

However, don’t store names of individual, or personal phone numbers, in the actual map database, and don’t add tags that are only relevant to your application.

4

For info, it’s “OpenStreetMap” - there’s no final “s”.

(not just being a pedant - if you spell it in a way that matches the main site it’ll look more legitimate to recipients)

5

Hi,

Since I would like to save land owners personal data (names and contacts), I see that don’t make sense include that information inside OSM.

It is possible to export OSM data for a small rectangle N40.3575, O-7.8446, S40.3032, E-7.7176, and than use it in my website with some webeditor (maybe ID) ??

This allow me save all information that I need for my project, and continue to be a collaborative project, where local people can contribute for this local community project.

Paulo

6

You would need to read the licensing carefully, as you would have created a derived work, and would be required to publish that, under some circumstances. You would need to determine whether you were publishing the derived work or making the data available. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3b._If_I_have_data_derived_from_OSM_data.2C_do_I_have_to_distribute_it.3F

You may need to take this up with the Licensing Working Group: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#5a._I_have_questions._Can_you_answer_them.3F

Also, as Portugal is part of the EU, it will have similar data protection legislation to that in the UK, so making personal information available to anyone other than person submitting and the emergency services would probably be a breach of the relevant law. Unless there is some specific exemption, you may need to register under the relevant legislation. https://www.cnpd.pt/english/bin/legislation/Law6798EN.HTM

At the moment, I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t publish a derived work that contained personal data, from an OSM licensing point of view, even though that could not be merged back into the main OSM.

Although it would be more work for you, it would be better if adding houses was done on the main OSM database, and your shadow database only contained the additional attributes. The two could be linked by the object identity, which would avoid contaminating the main map, but would make you more vulnerable to people deleting and re-adding (which is bad practice), or you could have some correlator in the main database. Whilst overuse of that, e.g. by normal businesses, might be frowned upon, your use case might be more acceptable, but I wouldn’t want you to do it just on my opinion.

There may already be some form of national identifier for buildings (although, in the UK, the one that exists is proprietary, and cannot be used on OSM).