Open data

Offered under the Open Database License 1.0

You may copy, distribute and modify these databases, and use them commercially, on three conditions: credit the source, offer any database you derive from them under this same licence if you make it public, and do not lock a copy behind a technical restriction without also offering one that is not locked.

A map, a screenshot or a yardage computed from the data is a Produced Work rather than a database, and distributing one only needs the credit. But there is a trap in that sentence, and it is the one that brought this page into being: if the database you made it from is a database you changed, publishing the work obliges you to offer that changed database as well, on these same terms. The apps are the Produced Work. These files are the database behind them.

This paragraph is a summary written by the people publishing the data, not legal advice: what governs is the text of the licence.

The aerial imagery is not in here

The photographs the mapping pipeline measured against are NAIP, flown for the United States Department of Agriculture, and are in the public domain in the US — they carry no share-alike obligation and they are not part of this download. What you get is geometry, not pictures. Each manifest records the date of the imagery its package was measured against, and lists the image files that live in our own copy and are not published here.

What these files are, and what they are not

course.json is what a rangefinder needs: the outline of every green, tee box, fairway, bunker and water hazard, the line of play down each hole, the layup targets, in WGS84 with every length in meters. Each feature carries where it came from — an OpenStreetMap element, an aerial segmentation, or geometry derived from those — how confident the measurement is, and the date of the imagery behind it.

It is not a playable course. There are no pin positions, no elevation model, no 3D, nothing a simulator could render a hole from. It is not a survey either: it is good enough to tell you a yardage, and it does not replace the markers on the course.

Corrections belong upstream

If an outline is wrong, the best place to fix it is OpenStreetMap, because that is where these packages start and a fix there reaches everybody rather than only us. Corrections we verify on the course go back there too.