Today we are welcoming the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo) to the open data community. After many years of free access for consumers, today, finally, it is providing reusable open government data that can be used to build and enrich new applications and datasets.

This is a high point of a development of open data availability in Switzerland in which the cantons have been leading for many years starting with the Canton Solothurn over a decade ago and is now policy in nearly all of them.

What does this mean for OpenStreetMap?

Short term nothing is going to change. While at the time I’m writing this we don’t have access to the final terms of use, we do have a good idea of what the content will be and some of the terms will not be completely compatible with our distribution licence, the ODbL. This rules out direct inclusion in our data, but will allow use as reference data for quality assurance. We are negotiating with swisstopo for compatible access terms, just as we have previously done for the municipality administrative boundaries way back in 2011 and more recently for use of the GWR address data and expect these issues to be resolved soon.

The most interesting data for us right now is access to swisstopos “swissimage” aerial imagery. This will at last provide us with good coverage in Switzerland’s mountainous regions, something that has been sorely missing from the global orthophoto mosaics.

To keep up with the developments, follow us on twitter @SwissOSM and subscribe to the Swiss OSM community mailing list.

Map image ©swisstopo