Can I record sensitive data against OSM and export as shape file?

There are two sides to this.

First, the license side. If you create data based on OSM - i.e. you display the OSM map and based on that you draw stuff - then that stuff inherits OSM's open license, currently CC-BY-SA 2.0. This does not mean that you have to contribute the data to OSM but it does mean that if you give the data to anyone, you must do so under the CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. Now if you need the data for use among yourself and a group of others and you can be relatively sure that those who have access to your data will not pass it on then that's fine; but you cannot slap on a legal restriction that says "you must not pass this on".

Second, the technical side. So you want to create a shape file that contains the stuff you have recorded against OSM. This is possible, but depends on the software you have used. You could conceivably use any GIS application that allows displaying tiles in the background, and save directly as shape file from there. Or you could use an OSM editor like JOSM, making sure that you put the sensitive data on a different layer; then save that sensitive data to an OSM file, and run osm2shp or any other osm-to-shape converter on that file. You will probably have to furnish the osm-to-shape converter with some rules so that it generates the columns you want.

Yes that is certainly possible. It would be a simple matter of separating the two data-sets from one another. Could you share what file formats this data is in? That would allow us to tell you what software & what procedure you would follow.

Cheers, ingalls

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