Currently, I am messing about using openstreetmap’s data to find road/street info for potential future analytics uses.
Openstreetmap isn’t exactly guaranteed to be complete or accurate though, and from what I read on another thread here, the other option is not free (PSMA data).
Is there a chance that sometimes in the future, road data will be available for free to the public? Google maps isn’t exactly “free”…
@shang, yes there is a chance. Can you please let us know what exact data you need/want and we can see if that can be released. There is no guarantee any layers we provide are complete as we only cover State roads in any case. We highly recommend at this stage to use Open Street Maps for your analysis. If there are discrepancies detected in Open Street Maps, please either let them know or us know and we can hopefully provide the relevant information to .
imho, even an official source is not guaranteed to be complete or accurate…
The problem with openstreetmaps is that any sort of analysis done with their data requires that the resultant data to be released under their ODbL license, and from what I grok’d (and I did ask on their discord about this) it seems that this requires you to release the new combined database when you use it.
For example, if one were to publish an analysis of the optimal bus routes given a database of student addresses + openstreetmap street data. If you publish your finding from it, you’d have to publish the combined database, which means publishing private information along with it.
disclaimer: IANAL and this is from my understanding of it - and there were some threads on hacker news describing this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10422019
Would be nice to have street data with that can be used without having to be subjected to copyleft licenses like ODbL. I’m also not sure about the legality of mixing OSM data with government licensed ones, and govhack time is nearing…
To start with, a dataset which contains road points, how many lanes are in there, intersections and where you’re allowed to turn would be nice. Zoning data, admin region, would be great to have too. It’d be nice to have all the other things that can be found in openstreetmaps. I know it might be a lot, but they say closed mouths don’t get fed…
Also, I did come across this: https://portal.spatial.nsw.gov.au/portal/apps/sites/#/home/items/c125bd319faf449681033cacf18584da but the data seems to say 1994 (with 2020 coming soon). I’ll find out how complete it is soon - ordered a full export and will take a look soon.
Here Maps is probably the best what you can get but might be too expensive. Very detailed, down to lines and speed limits.
Then you can play with nswtopo (Github) to get various spatial layers.