DATA SOURCE COMPLIANCE STATEMENT

Last reviewed: 2026-04-25 · CC-OPS-TLALOCORBIS

Open data · Verified compliant

Summary verdict

TLALOCORBIS is substantially compliant across all 15 upstream data sources, with the vast majority governed by the Open Government Licence — Canada (OGL-C 2.0), Open Government Licence — British Columbia (OGL-BC 2.0), Creative Commons family licences (CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 3.0/4.0), or the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence (ODbL). All of these permit commercial use, derivative works, and redistribution provided attribution is preserved. Our usage pattern — read-only HTTP GET, hourly cron limited to a single endpoint, otherwise one-shot snapshots, derived dataset re-released under CC BY 4.0 — is consistent with the letter and spirit of each licence.

Three items warrant explicit attention:

The Wikipedia waterfalls page is CC BY-SA — a share-alike licence. We extract only uncopyrightable factual fields (name, lat, lon, height) and tag those records accordingly.
Open-Elevation has no formal published terms and only an informal fair-use ask. We use it as a fallback only; HRDEM is the primary source. Self-hosting is on the hardening roadmap.
OSM Overpass (ODbL) requires share-alike on derived databases and a specific attribution string. OSM-derived nodes are tagged licence: ODbL-1.0 at the record level, separate from our overall CC BY 4.0 envelope.

Nothing is being strip-mined; nothing is paywalled downstream; no personal information is involved.

Per-source compliance

#	Source	Licence	Attribution	Commercial / redistribution	Status
1	HYDAT (ECCC Water Survey)	OGL-Canada 2.0	"Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence — Canada"	Yes / Yes	OK
2	WSC Real-time Hydrometric API (GeoMet)	OGL-Canada 2.0	OGL-C + ECCC	Yes / Yes	OK — within fair use
3	HRDEM via geo.ca datacube	OGL-Canada 2.0	NRCan	Yes / Yes	OK
4	NRCAN Hydrospatial CHN/RHC (FTP)	OGL-Canada 2.0	NRCan	Yes / Yes	OK
5	NPRI Water Releases 2023	OGL-Canada 2.0	ECCC	Yes / Yes	OK
6	Open-Elevation	No formal licence; underlying SRTM/GMTED public domain	Soft credit	Effectively yes / yes	FALLBACK ONLY — flagged for self-hosting
7	BC Freshwater Atlas (WFS)	OGL-BC 2.0	"Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence — British Columbia"	Yes / Yes	OK
8	BC WRIS Dams	OGL-BC 2.0	OGL-BC	Yes / Yes	OK
9	BCER short-term water use permits	OGL-BC 2.0	Province of BC + BC Energy Regulator	Yes / Yes	OK
10	BC Geographic Names (BCGNWS)	OGL-BC 2.0	Province of BC	Yes / Yes	OK
11	Six municipal ArcGIS FeatureServers (Vancouver, Surrey, Coquitlam, DNV, Port Coquitlam, Langley)	Mixed: OGL-Vancouver and municipal open-data licences	Each municipality by name	Yes / Yes (all six)	OK
12	OSM Overpass	ODbL 1.0	"© OpenStreetMap contributors" + ODbL link	Yes / Yes — share-alike on derived databases	OK — per-record tagged
13	Wikipedia (waterfalls page)	CC BY-SA 3.0 / 4.0	"Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA"	Yes — facts only	OK — factual extracts only
14	Metro Vancouver public reports	Public reports; facts only	Metro Vancouver	Facts: yes	OK — factual fields only
15	Canadian Hydrographic Service tidal tables	Crown copyright on publication; facts not copyrightable	CHS / DFO	Facts: yes	OK — numeric narrows only

Outstanding obligations we honour

Display the unified attribution credit line (below) in the site footer, /api/ JSON responses (meta.attribution), and /llms.txt.
For OSM-derived nodes, tag licence: "ODbL-1.0" at the record level.
For Wikipedia-derived nodes, restrict to factual fields and tag source: "wikipedia", licence_note: "facts only, CC BY-SA expressive content not redistributed".
Honour any takedown / opt-out request from a source within 30 days. Contact: admin@tlalocorbis.ca.
Re-review this document annually.

Unified attribution credit line

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence — Canada, the Open Government Licence — British Columbia, and municipal open-data licences (Vancouver, Surrey, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, Port Coquitlam, Langley). Includes data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) and Wikipedia contributors (CC BY-SA). Tide reference points © Canadian Hydrographic Service / DFO. Derived dataset © AXL Energy Inc., released under CC BY 4.0.

Responsible AI & data-use pledge

TLALOCORBIS commits to:

Read-only ingestion at rates within each source's stated or implied fair-use envelope.
Transparent attribution of every upstream source at the record level.
Free, non-paywalled redistribution of derived data.
Honouring takedown and correction requests within 30 days.
Not collecting personal information from upstream hydrological or infrastructure datasets.
Not training closed-weight commercial AI models on the derived corpus without re-publishing the model weights or describing the training data publicly.

Items flagged for legal review (transparency disclosure)

Open-Elevation — no formal ToS; defensible as fallback, not bullet-proof. Action: self-host or move to HRDEM-only.
OSM ODbL share-alike — interaction between ODbL (for OSM-sourced nodes) and our overall CC BY 4.0 envelope. Mitigation: per-record licence tagging. Legal confirmation pending.
Wikipedia CC BY-SA — same share-alike concern. Mitigation: extracting only uncopyrightable facts.
CHS tidal tables — Crown copyright on publication; we use only numeric facts. Legal confirmation pending we are not reproducing CHS's selection/arrangement in a way that triggers compilation copyright.
WSC Real-time at ~200,000 upserts/hr — this is our internal write rate, not the upstream HTTP volume. The actual upstream call is one paged OGC-API walk per hour, well within fair use.

Verification

Auditors can re-verify each upstream source's terms with the following commands:

curl -sIL https://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/                                          # HYDAT
curl -sL  https://api.weather.gc.ca/collections/hydrometric-realtime             # WSC GeoMet
curl -sIL https://datacube.services.geo.ca/                                      # HRDEM
curl -sIL https://ftp.maps.canada.ca/                                            # NRCAN Hydrospatial
curl -sIL https://pollution-waste.canada.ca/                                     # NPRI
curl -sIL https://api.open-elevation.com/                                        # Open-Elevation
curl -sL  "https://openmaps.gov.bc.ca/geo/ows?service=WFS&request=GetCapabilities" # BC FWA
curl -sIL https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/water-rights-licences-public  # BC WRIS
curl -sIL https://www.bc-er.ca/                                                  # BCER
curl -sIL https://apps.gov.bc.ca/pub/bcgnws/                                     # BCGNWS
curl -sIL https://opendata.vancouver.ca/pages/licence/                           # Vancouver
curl -sIL https://overpass-api.de/                                               # OSM Overpass
curl -sL  https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada               # OGL-C text
curl -sL  https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/data/open-data/open-government-licence-bc # OGL-BC text
curl -sL  https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/                         # ODbL text
curl -sL  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode               # CC BY-SA 4.0
curl -sL  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode                  # CC BY 4.0

Bottom line

TLALOCORBIS does not strip-mine government data. It uses public, openly-licensed sources at modest volume, attributes every one of them at the record level, and re-publishes derived data freely under CC BY 4.0. The two real legal nuances (OSM ODbL share-alike, Wikipedia CC BY-SA share-alike) are handled by per-record licence tagging and by extracting only uncopyrightable facts, respectively.