[OSGeo-Discuss] Water supply areas, watershed boundaries, street address GIS data

Mon Jun 5 02:15:33 PDT 2017

Dear All,

Please allow me to post the following content once again.

I would also like to thank Serena on her kind response on May 15.

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I am writing on behalf of Seki Team Co. Ltd., a Japanese company whose goal
is to develop a social networking service. The concept of the SNS is to
provide an answer to a question - 'Which river does your tap water, that
nourishes your life, come from?' 

In the SNS, user profile would contain the name of the river, from which a
user's tap water originates, as well as a map of the river, based on the
address that (s)he inputs. For this purpose, Seki Team is developing a data
base.

The goal of the SNS is to raise awareness of the most precious resource,
fresh water, and, importantly, to help empower local communities.

In order to develop such an SNS, three types of GIS data are required: 

(1)water supply areas (i.e. areas supplied from the same water source, or
from the same water purification plant; data need not be necessarily GIS,
but could also be text data), 

(2)river basin polygons (watershed boundaries) and 

(3)street address GIS point data. 

Notably, all the three classes of data are available for free download in
Japan, licensed by the National Land Numerical Information service of the
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT).

As for Japan, it is possible to display the name and a map of the river used
as a source of water supply in user's profile, based on the street address
data input by user.

As for the countries in the Table 1 below, for which (2)river basin polygons
and (3)street address GIS point data are available, it is possible to
develop another version of SNS, whereby the river basin name and its map
would be displayed in a user profile when (s)he inputs his/her address.

Thus, plan to develop the above two versions of the SNS.

I would like to ask  OSGeo community for advice regarding GIS data
acquisition.

We have been looking for the data for a number of countries worldwide and
concluded that, especially for water supply areas, the data are not
systematically supplied by relevant institutions/ companies/ utilities.
Notable exception is the US, where the information related to water supply
areas can be searched via Drinking Water Watch database.

We were hoping to find at least GIS data for watershed boundaries and street
addresses. 

As for street address GIS, we looked into open source data and made
inquiries to the relevant national mapping and cadastral agencies (NMCA),
but in many cases we found that the data is either not available or
prohibitively expensive. 

We also looked into open data sources such as Openaddresses.io, but even
though these data include coordinates, they do not contain the codes that
would show the relation between the particular address on the one hand and
city, municipality, county, province and/or other levels of administrative
division that the address belongs to, on the other.

Below is the table that shows the availability of the three GIS data
categories for the USA, Canada, European countries, Australia and others.

There might be a possibility that our research has not yielded expected
results because we did not look into the right places, and thus I would like
to ask for your help.

Do you know if it is possible to obtain GIS data regarding water supply
areas, street addresses and watershed boundaries for any of the countries in
the list below, where our result was negative (marked with other than a
"Yes"), either for free (preferably) or for a fee?

Table 1. Availability of GIS data

Country (Region)

Water Supply Areas GIS

Watershed Boundaries GIS

Street Address GIS

Denmark

	Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Estonia

	Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Finland

No

Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Iceland

		Yes.Free of charge

Luxembourg

	Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Norway

No

Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Poland

No

Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Slovenia

No

Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Austalia

	Yes

Yes.Free of charge

New Zealand

	Yes

Yes.Free of charge

Austria

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

Croatia

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

France

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

Germany

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

UK

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

Ireland

	Yes

Yes.Charged

Latvia

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

Lithuania

	Yes

Yes.Charged

Northern Ireland

	Yes

Yes.Charged

Portugal

	Yes

Yes.Charged

Sweden

	Yes

Yes.Charged

Switzerland

No

Yes

Yes.Charged

The Netherlands

	Yes

Yes.Charged

USA

Yes

Yes

No

Canada

No

Yes

No

South Africa

	Yes

No

Ukraine

No

(no reply)

(no reply)

Spain

	Yes

(no reply)

Turkey

		(no reply)

Bosnia and Herzegovina

No

No

No

Cyprus

	Yes

No

Greece

	Yes

No

Hungary

No

Yes

No

Malta

	Yes

No

Montenegro

No

No

No

Brazil

(no reply)

Yes

No

Italy

No

Yes

No

Romania

No

Yes

No

Belgium

	Yes

(no reply)

Czech Republic

No

Yes

(no reply)

Slovakia

No

Yes

(no reply)

Serbia

No

No

Yes.Charged

India

(no reply)

(no reply)

(no reply)

China

Albania

No

(no reply)

(no reply)

Armenia

		(no reply)

Azerbaijan

		(no reply)

Belarus

		(no reply)

Bulgaria

No

No

(no reply)

Macedonia

No

(no reply)

(no reply)

Georgia

		(no reply)

Kosovo

No

(no reply)

(no reply)

Moldova

	No

(no reply)

Russia

(no reply)

No

(no reply)

In case the relevant web site is not in English, we would also be very
grateful if you could provide not only the link to the home page of the
relevant web site, but the direct URL to the data source, accompanied by a
screen shot with a circled download button. We kindly ask for this, because
it is not always obvious how to download the data if a site is in a foreign
language.

In the near future, Seki Team Co. Ltd. plans to fulfill its mission by
hiring system engineers with the knowledge of the relevant languages.

Your help would be very much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Dragana Spica

Research Associate 

Seki Team Co., Ltd. Japan 

E-mail:  <mailto:dragana at seki-team.co.jp> dragana at seki-team.co.jp

Web site:  <http://seki-team.co.jp/en/> http://seki-team.co.jp/en/

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