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.
@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.
That’s great observation.
@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.
@pnorman
Well, this really was a deep-dive! I appreciate the help. I’ll edit my OP again 😆