Friday, March 19, 2010

Some public geographical data in the Spanish CNIG

The National Center of Geographical Information (Spain) has created a portal for the free geographical data discharge, something that had promised to be some time ago but that one had not made real. The available information is subject to two types of license and is the following one:
  • EGRN (Geographical Equipment of National Reference), frees and without restrictions although it is necessary to mention to the National Geographical Institute like owner of the information:
    • coordinates of geodesic apexes of I GNAWED (Network of Low Order) in format PDF.
    • cartographic grids (limits of the maps) of the series MTN25 and MTN50 (shapefile).
    • lines limit of the Spanish municipalities (shapefile).
  • Other materials with license of not commercial use:
    • ortoimágenes of the PNOA (National Plan of Ortofotografía Aérea) in format ECW.
    • maps escaneadosde the series MTN25, MTN50 and BCN200 in format TIF.
For my part I applaud the initiative although there are things that make me slightly disconcerted:
  • the geodesic apexes are in format PDF: why not in a spreadsheet or, simply, in a text file to facilitate his use?
  • the scanned maps MTN25 and MTN50 are recounted to the datum ED50 (ancient) and the ortoimágenes to the sheets MTN50 in the official datum ETRS89, with what they turn out to be incompatible. It is true that the series MTN were done when the ED50 was the official datum but, after three years from the Decree of the change, he was thinking that they might have transformed the ETRS89 and to give this way updated and useful information 100 %.
  • the lines limit of municipality are that, lines, not polygons. The information about the name of the municipalities or his codes of catalog of names is integrated in a somewhat exotic way: as attributes of the lines. This information, regrettably, is not easily recoverable at the time of processing the lines to restore the polygons topology (that is his).
In any case, welcome is this possibility of discharge and let's hope that quickly one should be add more useful and compatible information with other one. Cost the previous thing as suggestion of future progress that we all would see with good eyes. For giving a pair of ideas more: 1) to include suspense metainformation or at least of scale in the municipal limits and 2) to do that the searches for place names admit tildes.
A possible process to assign attributes to the municipalities is to use the lines given here, to create the polygons topology and to "absorb" the information of an existing similar layer in Global Administrative Areas, something worse in the tracing of the lines but with attributes assigned to the municipalities.
Roman theater and amphitheater in Merida segón the PNOA
To finish, a question to the respectable one on the use licenses. The first one seems equivalent to Creative Commons Attribution and the second one to CC Attribution - Odd number commercial. Am I mistaken and there is some difference that escapes from me? I ask about it because I would like seeing these icons increasingly on the pages of the Administration.

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