WikiProject Belgium/Mapping resources/SPW

SPW ('Service Public de Wallonie' in French, 'Public Service of Wallonia' in English) has resources for mappers with maps (PICC) and addresses (ICAR).

PICC Map of Wallonia

The PICC map is useful to use as a reference in Wallonia. Like any other map, it's not the absolute truth. Conform to OSM’s principles, ground truth always prevails. The PICC is comparable to the GRB in Flanders.

PICC is made from aerial photographs with a precision better than 25 cm. They are digitalized and orthorectified. This means that errors due to the obliqueness of the photography are corrected, something which is impossible to do as an OSM'er.

Much of Wallonia was mapped with other, less accurate sources, so realignment might be desirable.

You can use PICC as a background map. The layer is available in JOSM and iD. It will appear by default in the Imagery menu if you are viewing an area in Wallonia. Here is a legend of the map.

You can also download the PICC. While it requires an account and you need to consent to some rules, it really is OK to use in OpenStreetMap.

PICC license

Although PICC is available since 2010, the copyright status was unclear for a long time. In May 2018, SPW gave us a formal permission document to allow the use of the PICC WMS background map for tracing in OSM.

If you want to download the PICC, the license (Conditions particulières d’accès à l’obtention d’une copie numérique d’une donnée géographique numérique du Service public de Wallonie – Type C) allows it for use in OSM. This was added to the dataset in 2019.

ICAR Address data

ICAR ('Inventaire Centralisé des Adresses et des Rues en Wallonie' in French, 'Centralized Inventory of addresses and streets in Wallonia' in English) is SPW’s database of addresses in Wallonia.

The conditions and license are:

• Conditions générales d’accès à l’obtention d’une copie numérique des données géographiques numériques du Service public de Wallonie
• Conditions particulières d’accès  à l’obtention d’une copie numérique d’une donnée géographique numérique du Service public de Wallonie –Type C
• Conditions générales d’utilisation des données géographiques numériques du Service public de Wallonie

It is thus considered as open and usable in OSM.

We developed the ICAR address import tool for checking between the official dataset and what is in OSM too.