When mapping buildings, I’ll switch between the ESRI and Bing satellite maps, since they both offer different “freshnes” and clarity, depending on the area.
However, when I use my official municipal or regional websites, they have ESRI maps that appear to be quite a bit newer.
Is the licensing different across different ESRI imagery sources, or could I use the more updated one as a guideline?
EDIT: I think I found my answer from the official OpenStreetMap Wiki:
" Esri is a corporate member of the Foundation."
“Esri allowed the usage of Esri World Imagery (and its variants) in OSM mapping, without restrictions and requirements. Even attribution is not legally required.”
This is wonderful news! Having satellite images from only a few months ago, rather than a few years ago, is a game-changer!
So this might have been overly optimistic. There may be additional licensing restrictions on variants outside what’s available in the OSM editor.
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I live in Germany and I can select my official regional source right in the editor. Maybe it’s a licencing issue but maybe it just wasn’t added because no one ever brought up that it exists. I don’t know where people suggest imagery sources to be added but maybe you could find that out and see if anyone’s suggested it before and if not, suggest it yourself. Either way, you should be able to use that source without any legal issues, you’re not redestributing it.
Imagery sources are tracked here: https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index
We track how to load the aerial imagery (thus: the WMS-link), what license it has and where it is applicable. Only aerial imagery where we have permission for is allowed.
Updated my post. Looks like all ESRI imagery can be used!
NOT all ESRI imagery can be used. Their maps are probably copyrighted; and a background satellite view seen in an ESRI-product (which your municipality happens to use) is not necessarily cleared for usage, even though it happens to be shown in an ESRI prodcuct…
@Showroom7561 you seem to be jumping to conclusions a bit there. Yes we are allowed to use Esri World Imagery in its two variants, there is no permission for anything else.
PS: there have been cases were Imagery was available in the Esri imagery referenced above that wasn’t legally available for use to us elsewhere, in the cases that I tracked it ‘suddenly’ vanished after a while.
in its two variants
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, then. I didn’t see it mention “two variants”, and we’d only be talking about more recent images of the same satellite imagery.
ESRI does have their own editor for OSM, but I’m not sure if they use the same maps as the stock OSM editor or something else. Maybe I’ll give it a try and see if we have access to more.
In either case, I have no plans to actually use my municipalities version for actual mapping (way too tedious, even to try), but it’s so interesting to see these very recent images.
@Showroom7561 the two Esri imagery sources are the ones defined here https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index/tree/gh-pages/sources/world
@Showroom7561 if you have a link to your municipalities imagery in some form I can give it a quick look.
Thank you. The link is here: https://durhamregion.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html
You have to zoom into “The Regional Municipality of Durham” (Ontario, Canada) and enable the “Durham Imagery” basemap.
A little more clarity: where you see “esri” in the lower right corner, the full image says “POWERED BY esri”. In other words, ESRI is the platform, not the publisher. It’s similar to use of Leaflet or OpenLayers for “powering” (providing the architecture to display) a rendering of OpenStreetMap tiles.
@Showroom7561 while it doesn’t look good (multiple orgs claiming rights in the imagery), I would suggest contacting the e-mail here https://maps.durham.ca/arcgis/rest/services/Cached_Basemaps/DurhamImage_UTM/MapServer and asking if they would be prepared to allow OSM access for tracing, the details would have to be hashed out naturally.
