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I am looking for a way to properly map the large national parks in Thailand. I came across a treasure trove of data of this type the other day at http://www.protectedplanet.net/help but unfortunately, the data is copyrighted and AFAIK cannot be used in OSM.

Does anyone know where one could obtain GPX or KML data describing these boundaries?

asked 15 Oct '13, 02:59

AlaskaDave's gravatar image

AlaskaDave
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1

do you mean GPX or XML of data from another data source (which can be used in OSM) or from this (likely not usable) data source?

(15 Oct '13, 04:32) aseerel4c26 ♦
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Yes, I mean GPX or similar data that could be imported into OSM.

(15 Oct '13, 13:26) AlaskaDave

The formation of every national park is proclaimed in the Royal Thai Govenment Gazette, the archives of which can be searched online at http://www.ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/RKJ/announce/search.jsp (in Thai). Each proclamation is accompanied by a map, which as part of legislation should be public domain. I've mapped some national parks and protected areas using such maps, though they sometimes aren't perfectly accurate. Take a look at the source tags for Khao Yai National Park or Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary. No idea about GPX files though.

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answered 16 Oct '13, 19:57

Paul_012's gravatar image

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Regarding Thai legislation in Public Domain, seems (first glance) to be okay to be used. I made a short comment about it at the Thai wikiproject.

(16 Oct '13, 20:19) aseerel4c26 ♦

Paul,

Thanks for the information. I tried using this search text อุทยานแห่งชาติเขาใหญ่ (my knowledge of the Thai language is very basic) on the page you referenced but got no maps, only 5 documents, all in Thai, and all probably more about the legislation creating the park rather than the actual boundary.

If you didn't get GPX files from that site then how did you manage to draw the boundary?

(17 Oct '13, 01:26) AlaskaDave

Searching can be tricky since the parks aren't directly named in the article titles. For Khao Yai I manually traced the boundaries using the PicLayer plugin for JOSM, based on the map from http://www.ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/DATA/PDF/2542/A/119/4.PDF . I didn't make any projection corrections, since the area seemed fairly small.

(17 Oct '13, 18:41) Paul_012

I do not know much about Thailand, but did you check its wiki page or contact the local community ? They may know about local data sources.

While protectedplanet data is copyrighted, their help page let me hope that they might be amenable to allow import into OSM. You would need to contact them to get an official explicit permission to import and sub-licence the data into OSM, with attribution, by any OSM contributor. This requires some diplomacy but may be well worth it. Document your attempts on the wiki and mailing list.

When all else fails, these kind of sources can still be used as a todo list. Knowing that "there is a park around here" can be helpful, even if you need to assert the nature, location, shape, name, etc using other sources such as Bing.

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answered 15 Oct '13, 09:56

Vincent%20de%20Phily's gravatar image

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edited 15 Oct '13, 09:57

Thanks Vincent. I will try them. I'm not up for a long wrangle over copyright issues at the moment but maybe will attack it at some point in the future.

(16 Oct '13, 09:11) AlaskaDave
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question asked: 15 Oct '13, 02:59

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last updated: 17 Oct '13, 18:41

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