Administrative Regions

Hi All,

I just found a data source by GISTDA which gives boundaries of administrative regions all over Thailand. I have added the following entry to WikiProject Thailand:

For some odd reason it doesn’t work at low zoom levels.

My question is, when I draw administrative boundaries, do I enter designations as well? For example แขวงดินแดง or อำเภอสัตหีบ (Khwaeng Din Daeng or Amphoe Sattahib) or should I just enter ดินแดง or สัตหีบ (Din Daeng or Sattahib)

Can you tell us first what licence is used by GISTDA when publishing these data?

Are we allowed to use this in OSM?

I’m hiding the section in the wiki unless the license situation is clear.

I had native speakers checking the license of the Department of Land WMS recently and were not allowed to use it. I wonder if this WMS differs in licensing.
All things I currently saw coming from official departments had a non-commercial clause attached…

@Mishari: Thank you for your effort in researching this source. Please also clarify the affecting license. Allowance to use it must come from the owner of the data. Please document this in the wiki as well.

I will double check the license situation and get back to everyone. In the meanwhile, could someone answer my question regarding naming districts / subdistricts?

Hi Mishari,

Looks like you’re very motivated to have boundaries contained in OSM.

As this is something that can’t be mapped on the ground (with the mandatory exceptions to the rule like boundaries following rivers, etc) we rely on official sources providing this data.

For data imports like this the OpenStreetMap project has very high standards in which data is suitable for an import. Two models have been proven successful:
The easiest: data is declared Public Domain. Then consumers can do with the data whatever they like. The second option is that the owner of the data signs something like OSM contributor terms, stating that the data is allowed to be contained, redistributed and relicensed following the OSM license. Keep in mind that there is the option to change the license in the future. We don’t want to have the same problems again like in the past.

Now you have added a paragraph to the wiki page suggesting that Maps from wikimedia commons can be used as a source.

How certain are you that a CC-BY-SA license is compatible with our current ODbL license and the option to change this in the future?
During the license change it was clearly stated that copying data from the “old” OSM to the new is not allowed. I see no difference between old OSM data being CC-BY-SA and a map in commons being CC-BY-SA.

Please clarify, maybe on the legal-talk@ mailing list. I will commented out this section on the wiki page.

I really appreciate the effort you put into finding suitable data sources. But as others will build OSM Thailand on top of the foundation you do with your import it’s crucial that this foundation is rock-solid, especially in a legal way. So unless a source meets the high OSM standards it can’t be included.

Regarding the maps: Many of them seem to be created by a single user. You could try contacting this user and figuring out the original source of the boundaries. This could be available under a suitable license.

With the naming question: Please give the fully qualified name. It’s very easy for a software to create abbreviations or shorten a word. The other way is often impossible. Software can be a renderer like mapnik (current version already includes code to shorten names, people working on rules) or routing software or other consumers of data.

Very easy to shorten อำเภอสัตหีบ into สัตหีบ by software.

Many parts of Thailand’s administrative subdivisions follow physical features. In the absence of available free sources, it is possible to visually map such boundaries following available descriptive information. (I did so for some of Bangkok’s districts but detailed info doesn’t seem to be available on the BMA’s website any more.) The current provincial (changwat) borders, imported from VMAP0, can be quite inaccurate in some places and could likewise be improved. However, this is a very labour-intensive method and the effort could probably be more efficiently spent finding free sources for import.

I have just come across this problem trying to find boundary data for Phuket - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Phuket_Province

I followed the links from the maps on Wikipedia and found this statement from the user who created them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ahoerstemeier#Source_of_map_data

Looks like it’s bad news I’m afraid, unless someone wants to go through all of his sources and find out which ones were PD!

He also mentioned another source on his blog http://tambon.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/global-administrative-areas.html, unfortunatly that also seems to be a dead end at the moment unless they clear up their licensing.