OpenStreetMap
Finally, the project for importing the municipalities limits is finished. It took longer than expected considering some of the issues that arose during the project. First I would like to thank all the members of the team, and also to the volunteers who helped the team when doubts and issues arose.
Importing official data to OSM seems like a simple task at first, and it is up to certain extent,but when the amount of data is not that big, however when we talk about all the municipal limits of the whole country like in this case, problems might arise.
First problem, data availability. Before we started with this project (previous to 2014), the geographic data from the Mexican Government weren’t open. there was the possibility to get them for academic or personal use but using them in a project like OpenStreetMap required overcoming a series of legal gray areas which no team would be willing to deal unless they had the resources to tackle it. The best example of this case is Google, the team from Google Maps has used Mexico’s official geographic data (that means the databases from the INEGI) throughout the years, nevertheless before this data was declared open data by the Mexican Government, you needed a series of legal and licensing agreements that required analysis by a legal team, hence it was a considerable amount of expenses just to create a project of cooperation with the government, that’s the kind of deal only a big corporation like google could afford to fund so, as good as the information from INEGI might be , no individual or team from the OSM community would have the means to afford the expenses required in a licensing deal just to import data to OpenStreetMap, in fact that was one of the reasons we initially thought about creating a NGO to push the geographic open data agenda within the MExican Government.
