Data sources

OpenStreetMap

What it is: An open map of the world, built by its contributors.
What we use it for: The course inventory and the traced shapes on every course map: boundaries, holes, greens, tees, fairways, bunkers and water.
Attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.
How you can use it: The course geometry we adapted from it is yours too, free, under the same licence, outlines predicted by our model included: every traced course publishes it as GeoJSON at /courses/{state}/{slug}/geo.json , for example /courses/ak/anchorage-golf-course/geo.json .

What it is: An open database of golf courses.
What we use it for: Course records: identity, location, tees, scorecards, and rating and slope where held.
Attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0) via OpenGolfAPI, under the Open Database Licence.
How you can use it: Open data under the same licence, free to use with that attribution: through its API or its bulk download.

What it is: The US Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Imagery Program aerial imagery.
What we use it for: The aerial photograph under each course map.
How you can use it: Public domain, free to use.

What it is: The US Geological Survey's 3D Elevation Program LiDAR survey.
What we use it for: Elevation, green relief and contours.
Attribution: Elevation derived from USGS 3DEP lidar, public domain. Not endorsed by USGS.
How you can use it: Public domain, free to use.

What it is: Elevation survey contributed by state programmes, hosted by NOAA.
What we use it for: Elevation where federal 3DEP survey is not detailed enough.
Attribution: Credited on the course page wherever a dataset's terms require it; no endorsement is implied.

What it is: Pretrained model weights for aerial imagery, from the Allen Institute for AI.
What we use it for: The starting point of the model that predicts course outlines from USDA NAIP imagery where OpenStreetMap has none, drawn on 2,233 course maps, and of the model that predicts every hole line on 1,394 of them, where OpenStreetMap has mapped no hole.
Attribution: Contains information from SatlasPretrain, which is made available under the ODC Attribution License, beside the map on every page that draws a predicted outline or hole line.