Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Creative-Commons 4.0 (first draft)
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes:
It looks like with the release of CC 4.0 there may be two share-alike
licenses suitable for data with different copyleft provisions. CC with a
stronger copyleft and ODbL with a weaker one that allows produced works
under a non-free license.
I don't think it is as simple as that; the requirement to share the
derivative database that stands behind a produced work seems to be
stronger than what CC does.
The way I see it is that there are two ways to play.
If you want to be fully open then you distribute your new work in data form
so that it is easy for others to build on further. You distribute it as a
Derivative Database, and under the exact same terms you received the input data.
In that case the licence does not (or should not in my view) put any obstacles
in your way. You are giving others exactly the same rights you yourself
received, so you can just get on with your work and distribute the result
without further hassle.
However, for those who don't want to be quite so open, the ODbL has made a
concession by allowing the concept of a Produced Work. Your resulting work
does not have to be licensed under any particular terms. However, if you want
to take advantage of this option, then it is your responsibility to publish the
intermediate databases you used.
The one thing that CC does allow which ODbL may or may not (depending on the
legal definition of 'database') is to make a derived work which is much simpler
in structure and publish it under the same terms you received the data, without
disclosing anything further. For example, making a human-viewable map image
from the computer-readable OSM map. I would argue that this can be done too
in the ODbL case, by publishing your map tiles as Derivative Databases under
the ODbL, since I've not seen anything to suggest that a raster image file is
not also a database in law. But opinion differs on this point.
I believe your example of a route planner producing directions is similar here:
it is a much simpler work ('turn left, then right') derived from the larger
map database. But certainly a set of directions is itself a database, as anyone
who programmed LOGO knows.
--
Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com
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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Creative-Commons 4.0 (first draft)
I guess the number 1 requirement for CC4, from an OSM point of view, is that it be interoperable with the ODbL. Firstly so that those who are building applications using OSM data today would be able to keep doing what they are doing even if OSM started using CC4 in future, and secondly so that any such switchover would not have to delete any non-compliant data (such as imports where permission has been granted for ODbL but not for CC). This is something that Open Data Commons would have to take part in too, since Creative Commons cannot create an ODbL-to-CC migration path on their own. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Creative-Commons 4.0 (first draft)
Kai Krueger kakrueger@... writes: The draft for 4.0 now explicitly licenses database rights and addresses licensing of databases. However, it does not extend restrictions through contract where copyright and database rights do not restrict usage in the first place. It's an open question whether ODbL does that. It purports to, but how effective and enforceable is the contract it claims to enter into? I had hoped to get some legal opinions on this subject but the lawyers I employed told me that since the copyright part of the licence was enforceable (in the USA), they thought the contract-law enforceability was of academic interest only and they had not researched further. It also does not have the concept of produced works. It doesn't, no. I wonder whether a weaker but still compatible licence could be made by adding additional 'at your option' provisions. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Creative-Commons 4.0 (first draft)
BTW, only the BY-NC-SA (non-commercial) draft has been posted so far. ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] automated abbreviation changes?!
Perhaps nobody ever writes NW as 'north-west', but I expect that nobody ever pronounces it as 'enn double-yew' either. Speech applications may require the name in pronounceable and unabbreviated form. So there is certainly a case for having that in the map. Whether it should be in the 'name' tag is another matter. I would also point out that the abbreviated form Ln, St, and so on can be trivially derived from Lane and Street, but the reverse operation is not so easy (St could be Saint). That argues for picking the form with more information, if you have to pick one of them. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Feedback requested ... OSM Poland data
Kai Krueger kakrueger@... writes: We are using CC-BY-SA data to verify where we need to re-survey to create an ODbL database. There are even a whole bunch of great tools that make this as easy and systematic as possible. So I presume that form of verification is legal and is not covered by the share alike clause of the license. That's a big presumption. I would have expected that remapping would be done as a strictly 'clean room' operation, without looking at the existing CC-BY-SA data at all, but that doesn't seem to be happening. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Feedback requested ... OSM Poland data
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: If we were to say we don't think verifying data creates a derived work, would the great mass of OSM mappers be content to see Google (for example) use our effort to determine where new streets are; send the StreetView cars/satellites out; and have the new streets on Google Maps within a couple of days? More to the point, would OSMF be happy for mappers to do the reverse operation, using Google Maps as a guide to where to go out and resurvey? If OSMF makes a statement that verifying data doesn't create a derived work, it must do so only on the basis of justifiable legal opinions, which are publicly reviewable. Anything else would not be a statement of belief about the law, but a special exemption or extra permission outside the normal licence, which cannot be done without a 2/3 vote. If OSMF does decide, after careful consideration of the legal evidence, that verifying data does not create a derived work under copyright or related rights, then a necessary consequence is that OSM mappers will be able to make use of other maps to verify their work, just as UMP will be able to use OSM. All this goes away if the OSM map continues to be published under CC-BY-SA in parallel with ODbL. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Feedback requested ... OSM Poland data
Legally there's no downside for granting extra permissions. They are additive on top of whatever licence is used and don't damage anyone else's use of the data. However, it is not in the spirit of the community terms for OSMF to grant exemptions or extra permissions - particularly not if they are specific to one user, which looks like favouritism. So I suggest, firstly, any extra permission granted should be to everyone on equal terms or not at all; and secondly, if you believe that the permission notice is necessary as an addition to the ODbL (rather than just a clarification of what is already the legal situation) then its text needs to be approved by the OSMF board and a 2/3 vote of active contributors. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Feedback requested ... OSM Poland data
Is there a way to provide what UMP want by making a Produced Work (which could be public domain or CC) rather than a Derived Database? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Is the license change easily reversible?
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: But, even after the switch to ODbL, OSMF could go back to CC-BY-SA 2.0 at any time - and would, as far as I can see, only need a simple majority board decision for that. Not so - in the meantime, information might have been added to the map which is not compatible with CC-BY-SA 2.0. Recall the wording of the contributor terms and the clarification given by the LWG: contributions have to be compatible with the *current* licence, whatever that may be. That means that right now, users are able to upload contributions which (because of rights held by third parties) are usable under CC-BY-SA 2.0 only - and that is why 'odbl=clean' and 'contributor_terms=clean' are not quite the same thing. If the licence is changed, then from that point onwards it will be possible to upload contributions which are usable only under the newer licence. This is one reason why dual licensing under both CC-BY-SA and ODbL is a good idea - it makes sure that, under the contributor terms, new contributions to the map are usable under both licences. This puts OSMF in a position of quite some power. That's a whole nother discussion. Personally, I would advocate splitting OSMF in two: one organization which manages the servers, holds the openstreetmap.org domain name and any related naming rights such as trademarks, and performs most of the other OSMF functions. The second organization would exist only to hold rights in the map database and sublicense it under ODbL/DbCL or other licences. This split would add some useful checks and balances - among other things it would prevent control of the servers being used to force through licence changes. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [Talk-GB] Help with remapping
Andy Allan gravitystorm@... writes: 1.) Assume you need to replace a node which is in the intersection of several ways. Using Potlatch 2, select the junction node and press O. This deletes the node and attaches a new node to the cursor - you need to click to position it. If you reposition the new node in same place as the old one, this hasn't really achieved anything. At best, it has obscured the history a bit so it's no longer quite so clear that the node was originally added by a CT-decliner. Rather than going through this charade why not just add odbl=clean to the node? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Please do not use Code-Point Open, (postcode) data in OSM
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: OS data is currently not distributed under UK Open Government Licence but their own license which then incorporates UK Open Government Licence. Their own license includes a downstream attribution clause which OGL does not. Ah - I was going by http://data.gov.uk/dataset/os-code-point-open which seems to indicate the OGL is used. So that web page is not quite correct? CC-BY-SA technically forces map makers to attribute each and every contributor to OSM, ODbL does not. Is it at least possible to combine map data under ODbL with the Code-Point Open data to make a 'map plus postcodes' data set? I am guessing that the answer is no, at least not if you want to distribute that data. ODbL does not require attribution but it might be revised in ODbL 1.1 to allow an attribution requirement to be added by downstream users. Then it would be possible for users of ODbL-licenced maps to combine them with other open data that has an attribution requirement, although sadly such data could not be used to improve OSM itself. (As well as this postcode data set, another example of geodata with attribution requirement is the CommonMap project, a CC-BY licenced map of the world, which was partly intended as a common upstream which several map projects including OSM could take data from.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Please do not use Code-Point Open, (postcode) data in OSM
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: I regretfully have to relay that while the Ordnance Survey has no objections to geodata derived in part from OS OpenData being released under the Open Database License 1.0, this has to permanently exclude Code-Point Open, (postcode) data. That data is distributed under the UK Open Government Licence. If that licence does not allow use under ODbL, then the same surely applies to other data released with that licence. I am sure that the Royal Mail commercial licensing people would very much prefer that the open postcode data were more restricted, but that does not mean they can somehow make exceptions to the licence. Could you give more details about what particular permission is needed? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-talk] Making dealing with license problem objects easier
David Earl david at frankieandshadow.com writes: I'm not saying I could have mapped it, but I have checked what changed and explicitly verified it against independent sources. So if somebody was tracing from Google Maps, but then you checked from independent sources and verified the information they added, it's okay to have that data in OSM? Likewise, if some map company copied data from OSM into their proprietary map, but said that they had verified it against independent sources, that would be okay? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [Talk-GB] GB License Change Readiness
Personally, I am still working to find a way forward so that OSM can remain compatible with Creative Commons. I joined OSM to help make a free Creative Commons (or compatible) map of the world and that remains my goal. There are a couple of avenues I am working on which I'd be happy to talk about by email or face to face. I had hoped that discussions with the LWG might result in a reasonable compromise such as continuing to offer CC-BY-SA in parallel with ODbL, and that I would be able to persuade other pro-CC mappers to support that too. But I can't speak for what others will do. I really don't want to just give up and go home unless every possibility has been exhausted. It is not too late. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
mike@... writes: Any chance of you changing your decline now, that is the easiest way of decreasing deletions? I am still hopeful of finding a way forward that will mean the OSM data can continue to be distributed under a licence that I would consider free and open. Although Creative Commons or public domain would be ideal, they are not the only choices. In the light of the legal reports I have shared with the LWG, I hope to persuade the Open Data Commons people that the EULA-like parts of the ODbL (whereby it tries to limit users by contract to give up rights that they might otherwise have) may not be necessary - at least for OSM. I know that even on the ODC mailing lists this is not a universally liked feature of the ODbL. (I had also asked the lawyers to investigate whether this contract-law part of the ODbL might not in fact weaken the enforceability of share-alike, since breach of copyright is much easier to show and has much stronger remedies (for our purpose) than breach of contract - so you really do not want the courts to start interpreting your licence as a contract. Unfortunately they decided that because the OSM map data was within the scope of copyright, the question of the ODbL's enforceability was not important, so they did not answer it.) I still feel that starting to use the ODbL does not automatically imply stopping the use of CC licensing, and that it would be better to offer both the old and new licences, as Wikipedia did with their licence change. As you know I discussed this with the LWG at a meeting a few months ago (although not all members were present). Since we now have a commitment from Creative Commons to release a new version of CC-BY-SA next year, it would make sense to defer the decision of whether to abandon CC altogether until then. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
I think the test must be the same as for any other data which OSMF does not have permission to use. If a mapper added a node by copying from Google Maps, but then another mapper moved it to a different position using a permitted data source, is it okay to keep that node in the database? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
A common way to adjust a node position is to move it halfway between the old one and the new one. For example, if there is already a way on the map traced from GPS but you have a new GPS trace for it which is a bit different, it would be unwise to adjust it to exactly fit your new trace. But you may expect to improve accuracy a bit if you adjust it to about halfway between the old and new positions. Similarly a node such as a bus stop may have its position tweaked to somewhere in between where it was and the new observed position. So I don't think you can assume that when a node is moved its position information is 'cleaned' somehow. The new position as often as not is derived from the old position. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
Richard Weait richard@... writes: We consider that the creation of an object and its id to be a system action rather than individual creative contribution. However, 'the creation of an object and its id' never occurs by itself. At a minimum, you create an object with id and lat/lon, and that location data is part of the OSM map. The next version of the node, even if its position has been adjusted, is likely to be derived from this data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
Simon Poole simon@... writes: If somebody is improving the geometry of a way because he is interpolating from the available information (may that be GPS traces of other ways) then he is doing exactly that, That is exactly it: improving the geometry of a way. Not replacing it. If you take an existing street and adjust its position it is hard to argue that you have taken a completely clean-room approach to doing so, not using the existing geometry at all. The existing geometry is there on your screen while you are editing! Yes, there are some cases where you might totally ignore the existing geometry (perhaps because it has been messed up by a newcomer hitting the wrong buttons in Potlatch) and recreate it wholesale. But those are a small minority. just because he is reusing an existing object (pre-numbered sheet remember) to mark a new interpolated position doesn't mean it is a derived work Agreed - that in itself is not enough. If a mapper grabbed some existing node from the database and removed its location data entirely (perhaps taking it from a global stock of 'spare nodes' kept in the Pacific ocean) then it would clearly not be derived. But why do that when you can just click to create a new node? If the mapper starts with a node that's already in roughly the right place and just adjusts it a little bit, then the new position is derived from the old one. Now if you wish to state that interpolation itself creates a derived work, please argue that. By interpolation I was referring to the practice of taking two paths (be they two GPS traces, one GPS trace and one existing way on the map, a way on the map and a path visible in an aerial photograph, etc) and combining them to make a new path which is roughly halfway between the two. For example if mapping from GPS plus an existing out-of-copyright map you may trace a way which is about halfway between your GPS trace and what you see on the old map - since neither of them by itself is entirely accurate. Doing this makes the new path derived from both the old one and the new one. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
Simon Poole simon@... writes: If you take an existing tainted way and move it they way is still going to go, so what is your point again? Are we not talking about the following situation: - mapper A (who has agreed to the CTs) creates a way - mapper B (who has not agreed) adjusts the way's geometry, creating some new nodes - mapper C (who has agreed) adjusts the position of those nodes In this case the third edit would have to be reverted because the new position of the nodes is still based on work contributed by mapper B, even though they have been moved since he created them. You are using derived in a common language sense, please argue why this is a derived work in the IP/legal sense (choose any jurisdiction you would like). That is a question for lawyers. I do not know whether it is a derived work under copyright law or sui generis database rights. Normally the approach of the project is to not import data from sources that do not have permission, and if it gets into the database, to delete it (reverting the changeset) as soon as possible. We don't get into the business of judging whether we might get away with including it anyway, because we are not lawyers. So we have to use the common-sense judgement of whether one piece of work builds on another. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
Sorry, I appreciate your taking the time to go through the arguments on this but I think I have said all I have to say about node positions. I'll let others decide whether what I wrote makes sense. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] feedback requested
mike@... writes:
2) good faith - are we making a reasonable effort to remove the IP of
folks who have not given us permission to continue? I certainly agree
with Ed that we should treat ex-contributors no differently to any IP
owner ... but feel we are already doing that in this and other
conversations.
Mike, in that case I would ask you to apply the 'Google Maps test'. If some
map data were entered by copying from a third party who did not give permission,
but then edited in good faith, how much of the data needs to be unpicked?
In the past OSMF has taken a very cautious approach to this, which I believe
is the right one.
If after careful consideration you do formulate a policy ('the LWG declares that
creating a node is not a creative operation, so it can be kept as long as it has
been moved by somebody else afterwards', or whatever you decide), then it should
also be applied to such third-party-copyright situations going forward.
Originally it was promised that no big deletion would go ahead if it would cause
too much damage to the OSM data. Is that still the case and if so who is tasked
with deciding whether to pull the switch?
--
Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com
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Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data
Simon Poole simon at poole.ch writes: Are there any problems with CC-BY-SA 2.0 relating specifically to the contribution of content by individual mappers to the OSMF servers? Well we could discuss if in general CC-by-SA 2.0 is at all suitable as a replacement for contributor terms, but naturally for example the sui generis database rights are one of the problematic issues (being the most likely IPR that large contributors could own). I believe that the statement you agree that your contributions can be distributed under CC-BY-SA 2.0 should cover it, as it doesn't specifically refer to database right or copyright or any other rights. The 2.0 licence does not mention database right by name, but it does automatically allow distribution under 3.0, which does. Other collaborative projects such as Wikipedia must face the same issues. And we know that they cheated Yes, and that is the best way to do it! If the OSMF/Open Data Commons people were able to work together with CC (and admittedly the 'Science Commons' statement about not using copyleft for scientific data muddied the waters) to put in an upgrade clause between CC-BY-SA and ODbL, all the difficulties would pretty much vanish into thin air. for example Wikipedia doesn't really distribute its data for use in other projects (commercial or other) and in so far doesn't have as large responsibility towards downstream data users as OSM has. Wikipedia in my opinion took much better care of downstream users than OSMF is planning to. They continued to licence under the old licence and the new one, at the user's option. That means that no downstream user who was using Wikipedia before the changeover got cut off. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data
Simon Poole simon at poole.ch writes: The upgrade clause in 4.b of CC-by-SA 2.0 a) only applies to a Derivative Work. While this is only a small hurdle to surmount, it does mean that it doesn't apply to a one-to-one copy of the work b) is a right granted to the the licensee. If we assume the popular every mapper has IPR in his contribution and licenses that to the OSMF pre-CT construction is correct, this implies that while the OSMF could distribute the database under a later licence, the relationship between mapper and OSMF would still be stuck with CC-by-SA 2.0 with all the related issues. Are there any problems with CC-BY-SA 2.0 relating specifically to the contribution of content by individual mappers to the OSMF servers? Are you worried that individual mappers have not transferred their sui generis database rights, or something else? Other collaborative projects such as Wikipedia must face the same issues. It's hard to believe they need to get every contributor's permission in order to do a licence upgrade. (Indeed the Wikipedia transition from GFDL to GFDL-or-CC was done using an upgrade clause in the former licence.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] instead of replacing data can I just revert to the last known clean version?
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: I am experimenting with using the tag odbl=clean for this, I guess ct=clean would be better since there may be data which is usable under the CTs but is not yet distributable under ODbL+DbCL. (Recall that the CTs require the content must be distributable under the current licence, which means CC-BY-SA - this was clarified a few months ago by the LWG I believe. Of course in the majority of cases CT-able data is also ODbL-able.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] instead of replacing data can I just revert to the last known clean version?
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: I guess ct=clean would be better since there may be data which is usable under the CTs but is not yet distributable under ODbL+DbCL. But are we interested in such data? I mean - if there *was* data not usable under ODbL, then it would be a good idea to remap it now, right? Maybe so, but it's not shown by the usual CT status maps. odbl=clean (or perhaps dbcl=clean?) would be a further tag to add in addition to ct=clean. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data
Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org writes: Only recently a legal analysis was posted by Ed Avis that came to the conclusion that while CC-BY-SA 2.0 may be fine for data, CTs really are required The legal analysis looked in detail into the question of how far copyright applies to OSM map data in the USA. But the issue about whether OSM counts as a joint work under US copyright law is something that the two lawyers only briefly touched on. They even suggested to me leaving it out of the final memo altogether, since it was just a starting point for further research - I said I was happy to leave it in. (Briefly, if the work has joint copyright ownership then any owner, meaning potentially any contributor, has full rights to do anything with it, as long as profits are shared among the owners. This is a US peculiarity.) As others have also noted on the legal-talk list, there are good reasons to believe that OSM is not simply a joint work. As with other legal arguments, it fails the on the ground test - if OSM is a joint work under US copyright law then a wide variety of works (such as much free software) would fall under the same rule, yet this does not seem to be the case in practice, so there is probably more to it. So I think it is too soon to draw the conclusion that CTs really are required; I would not want it to join copyright does not apply in the unhappy group of initial legal questions which were converted into often-repeated Internet memes. Further, the lawyers mentioned to me that in order to get around the joint work problem some contributor terms would be needed, but that the particular CTs the OSMF has come up with are not really designed to address the issue. They did not compare the new CTs with the terms the project had before, which essentially said that you agree to license under CC-BY-SA, and which might be equally effective at addressing the joint work problem if it exists. We do not yet know. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Transition to CC-4 instead of destroying data
Richard Weait richard at weait.com writes: If CCv4 ends up being better than ODbL, and agreeable to the osm community at large, we could certainly transition to it. Or indeed add it as an option - while keeping ODbL to stay compatible with people who have started using the map under those terms. It's not necessarily a case of whether one licence is better than another, because each may have their strengths and weaknesses for different users of the data, particularly when it comes to being compatible with other share-alike projects. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [Talk-GB] OS VectorMap water feature import
Perhaps you should cross-check the OS water features against Bing imagery. That would eliminate some of the errors from trusting any one source too much. Of course it still wouldn't be as good as walking around the outside of each water feature with a GPS to get the boundary, but I can say from experience that this takes a very long time! In some parts of the country there are waterways traced from out-of-copyright OS maps or from Street View tiles. Getting the shapes from OS VectorMap will certainly be an improvement on that. In my opinion it will also be an improvement compared to not having the water features at all. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Project Drake - mapping the University of Cambridge
David Earl david@... writes: I'm not overly wedded to name=Clare College (University of Cambridge) and the like. Indeed, for the University rendering I will be removing these suffixes automatically because the context and colours will make it completely obvious. Well, in that case, can I urge you to tag for the renderer and remove the suffix from the data! I think anyone looking at a map of Cambridge might have an idea that there is a university there and that any colleges or academic-sounding buildings are more likely than not to be part of it. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - publishable memo for USA
I asked two attorneys in the USA to look into the question of whether the OSM map data falls under copyright. Please see earlier messages in this thread for details of how the lawyers were chosen and the question asked. They produced a written report which they asked me not to distribute publicly because of attorney-client privilege. I have sent a copy of that report to the LWG and the OSM board, and I am happy to share a copy with anyone who'd like to see it, but I think it is necessary to have some results which can be fully public. To this end the lawyers have produced a public version which does not mention OSM by name, although the issues addressed are those relevant to our project. You can see the report at http://membled.com/work/osm/Map_Project_Memo_public_FINAL.pdf -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - publishable memo for USA
Simon Poole simon@... writes: In summary I don't quite see how the report changes anything, summarized it states: a) maps are copyrightable in the US (not that we didn't know that) b) online maps are copyrightable in the US (we assumed that too) c) you could make a case that the underlying data of an online map is copyrightable (which we assume to some point for style files and similar... for the actually geographic data it is probably just speculation) I think it's rather stronger than you could make a case. While the report is couched in conservative lawyer-speak, my understanding from speaking to the two attorneys is that it's pretty clear: the underlying data of the map falls within copyright. If you like, I could send you the full report which addresses OSM and the ODbL specifically? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - publishable memo for USA
andrzej zaborowski balrogg@... writes: OSM, Wikipedia and other projects having joint ownership by its contributors could have quite important consequences, personally I think it's very unlikely that this is right. The cost to acquire joint authorship would be low and the rights acquired very broad. In my view it would effectively be a loophole in copyright which would allow any other compatibly (e.g. share-alike) licensed work to be imported into the database and then relicensed under any other terms. Anyone could become a joint copyright owner in any (freely licensed) work they wish. That's my view as well. If making a joint work really were so easy, we would see contributors to Linux, for example, taking advantage of it. The FSF would be tearing their hair out trying to close this loophole in a new version of the GPL. So I don't think it is quite as simple as that. But I was unable to convince the two American lawyers on this point. They did say that they had only scratched the surface of this issue and had not researched it in depth. So the comments about joint copyright ownership should be taken as a starting point for future investigation rather than a definitive statement. I mentioned the joint ownership issue to the LWG in their weekly conference call but I got the impression that none of the LWG members were particularly concerned about this issue or motivated to change the contributor terms to allow for it. So I asked the lawyers not to spend further time on it. I remember Anthony on the osm-fork list has previously explained why OSM is not a joint copyright work and what would be required for it to be one, have the lawyers considered that reasoning? No, I wasn't aware of the arguments here. I could ask them to undertake further research about this but only if there is interest from the LWG or the OSMF board. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] ODbL and publishing source data
Eugene Alvin Villar seav80@... writes: Taking this argument to its logical conclusion, every digital file is a database of bytes Yes, I suggest that legally speaking this is likely to be the case. Certainly any digital file that is in a documented, structured file format with certain fields in certain positions has just as strong a claim to being a 'database' as, say, the OSM planet file. The European definition of a database is a collection of independent works, data or other materials arranged in a systematic or methodical way and individually accessible by electronic or other means. Individual pixels comprising a typical image (say a PNG map tile) are not independent works. Each pixel cannot stand on its own and aren't useful unless considered together with its neighboring pixels to form an image. That makes some sense but you are implicitly taking the individual pixel as the level of granularity. If you took the OSM planet file as your example once again, you could state that neither the individual co-ordinate numbers like 50.1234, nor individual tag strings like 'highway', have any independent existence. They must stand together with other data items to form a complete object such as a node, which even then may not have much meaning without others. Richard F. noted that audiovisual works... as such are not databases. I imagine it is an open question whether this means photographs and other pictorial images, and whether it applies to images with a defined schema such as heatmaps (which can equally well be considered as a database of co-ordinates mapped to values) or to diagrams and maps with a defined schema and a strict correspondence between pixel co-ordinates and geographical position. (I also note that as such is a weasel phrase which European law may wiggle through, as with the exclusion of computer programs as such from patentability.) In general I think that introducing the concept of database into licensing causes more problems than it solves, and tends to muddle more than it clarifies, but that's just my opinion. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
[OSM-legal-talk] Community norms (was: ODbL and publishing source data)
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: I am interested in exploring this further with the aim of finding good community norms, nailing down the problem cases, and making the introduction of ODbL for OSM a success. I think you have to be careful about going too far with community norms. They may give the misleading impression that copyright holders have endorsed them so that they are legal statements of what you can do with the map, but this is not the case. Also, the contributor terms permit distribution under ODbL, not 'ODbL with community norms', so it would not be within OSMF's mandate under the CTs to introduce additional material to the licence, however well- intentioned. Community norms can serve to narrow the permission (as in: although X may be permissible according to the letter of the law, we don't feel it fits the spirit) but they cannot state anything with authority where the underlying legal situation is unclear. More to the point, would it not be better to fix up ambiguities in a new version of the ODbL? Migrating to it later would be pretty painless since the licence is forward-compatible. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Community norms
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: OSMF is the holder of the database rights; while OSMF may not be able to state anything with authority they can certainly say we guarantee that we will not sue you if you adhere to the following. Which is good enough. I think that database right is only a small part of the picture, copyright being at least as important (if the legal advice I got from Francis Davey relating to European law is correct). Note that there is sui generis database right, and separate from that there is database copyright. Database copyright is not owned by the OSMF. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Locator 201111 released, musical chairs updated to use it
Robert Scott lists@... writes: Does the comparison look at not:name tags? It will (it will mark them in pink), but only when the osl entry has actually been matched to that not:name-tagged osm way. Makes sense. But do you know why it didn't match in the example I mentioned? The not:name is the same as the name in OSL and the geometry is similar, although split into two ways in OSM. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Locator 201111 released, musical chairs updated to use it
Robert Scott lists@... writes: The new OS Locator is out. I've just updated musical chairs. http://ris.dev.openstreetmap.org/oslmusicalchairs Great. Does the comparison look at not:name tags? For example object 4268860 is tagged to say that the OS Locator name is wrong, but is flagged in the check http://ris.dev.openstreetmap.org/oslmusicalchairs/map? zoom=18lat=51.52351lon=-0.1936layers=B0TTosl_id=491357view_mode=pseudorandom -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
I don't think the tagging of place=city has ever reflected official city status. You could change it, but that would be a departure from existing practice. I doubt most people would expect to see 'London' and 'Westminster' as equally-sized cities within a few miles of each other. The existing place node for London is at Charing Cross, I believe: not even within the City of London. I would suggest leaving place=city as the common everyday meaning of city, even though that is not strictly defined, and to introduce a new tag for the legal designation if that is felt to be useful. Alternatively, the renderings (and possibly other software such as Nominatim) could be changed to not depend on place=city, and then it would be possible to clean it up without disruption. Yes, this is tagging-for-the-rendererism, but having the capital city sometimes appear as 'Westminster' instead of 'London' (depending on random rules about overlapping text labels) would be so offputting I think it is worth paying some attention to what is currently rendered. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Another way of looking at this is that it comes from tagging a 'place node' rather than mapping cities as areas. Individual nodes for counties have been phased out in favour of exact boundaries and the same could happen for towns and cities. If you map an area, that forces the choice of whether your object is intended to represent the City of London, or Greater London, or whatever. Of course, once you have local authority boundaries you also have city boundaries, they just need to be tagged somehow as 'this local authority is for a city'. So in the long term the answer may be to stop rendering and address lookup and other applications from using the place=city nodes at all, but have them work based on areas. Then the ambiguous place nodes can eventually disappear. Since that isn't going to happen any time soon, I suggest leaving the current somewhat fuzzy definition of place=city as it is, and adding more tightly-defined tags such as 'designated city status' or population if they are wanted. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Ed Loach ed@... writes: Someone in this thread suggested using another tag. I forget the suggestion but along the lines of designation=city or official=city or something. I briefly thought that this was a good solution, but after further consideration realised we would probably need to always add it to place nodes in the UK just to confirm that we have tagged something as what it actually is, and not as something different based on area or population. Yeah, well that's useful as a way of tracking work in progress. You could also explicitly tag every large settlement that *doesn't* have city status. The note tag can cite the list of cities or date of Royal Charter or whatever. Since it's unlikely that every other country will change its tagging of cities to match ours, it doesn't hurt to tag things a bit more explicitly. Then someone using the map can know what the official cities are without having to remember the rules about what place=city signifies in each individual country. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Tom Hughes tom@... writes:
If you map an area, that
forces the choice of whether your object is intended to represent the
City of London, or Greater London, or whatever.
The problem with that approach is that concepts like town and city
do not have well defined boundaries in the UK.
Implicit in my argument for mapping areas was the assumption that
you'd want to map the official definition of city rather than the
informal one. AFAIK, every city has a defined boundary, even if
nowadays it is no longer marked by a city wall.
For 'town' this is not so, and you could not take a strict approach there.
If you decide to map the informal view of where a city lies, rather
than its legal boundary, then you have a choice of picking an
arbitrary boundary or picking an arbitrary centre point. Somehow in
OSM we are more comfortable with the latter, but it is hard to justify
from first principles. By giving less information, a single point has
less scope for edit wars and is not going to fool users of the map
into thinking a hard boundary exists where one doesn't. Nonetheless
applications might like to know about such informal boundaries ('you
are now entering Reading', announces the satnav).
--
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Re: [Talk-GB] UK cities
Borbus borbus@... writes: I think a better solution would be to tag some place as being the city centre and then the renderer can be told: place the name somewhere within the area of the city, but try to place it close to the city centre. Yes, in general an area-with-centroid would be a useful type of object. It could apply to forests, seas, even some countries. I suppose it would be tagged as a relation with two members (a way for the area and a node for the centroid) and then tagging would be on the relation. Similar to what happens now for multipolygons. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-talk] Fixme: A proposal
Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org writes: Problems with the data that are automatically detected should never ever be tagged on the data itself. This is useless, and worse, its counterproductive. They should never be *automatically* tagged on the data itself. Only manually detected problems should be tagged with fixme. I would add, however, that if an automated tool reported a problem and you manually investigated it but weren't able to fix it immediately (or to immediately determine that the tool is wrong), then you can tag fixme with a note on your work so far. For example, FIXME=Do these roads join here? Not clear on Bing imagery. Survey needed. That will be a useful note for somebody planning to visit the area later so they can check this place if they wish. But deluging the area with large numbers of automatically generated fixme tags is not helpful, because anyone can run the tool themselves to see that. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [Talk-GB] British Antarctic Territories
Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists ajrlists@... writes: Thanks to the National Library of Australia I have a number of mostly out of copyright (or nearly so) British Ordnance Survey Maps for the British Antarctic Territories . Yet again we see the lazy armchair mappers trying to 'map' areas they have never visited. Instead of wasting time with dubious-quality Ordnance Survey maps why don't we organize some mapping parties and community outreach to the penguins? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - initial results
In the USA the only two lawyers who are doing the work are Cathy Gellis and Jon Rubens. Although they often work together, they are at separate firms. Cathy Gellis was recommended to me by Francis Davey, the barrister investigating in England. He in turn was mentioned by LWG members, and has popped up on this list. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Copyright status of OSM map data - initial results
Rob Myers rob@... writes: In the US, the two lawyers found that the OSM map data is copyrightable. They mentioned the explicit inclusion of maps in copyright law But geodata is not a map, and the copyright on the database is not the copyright on its contents. As I understood it, the precedents they found showed that copyright does cover the geodata contained in the database, and is not dependent on having a paper map or the difference between database and contents. However I didn't have time to go over these matters in depth. If the written report doesn't address your concern, would you like to join in a conference call with the legal team so you can put it to them directly? I expect I could arrange this. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] How to start to remove non-CT compliant data..
Why not do what Wikipedia did and work together with the licence authors (in this case Creative Commons and Open Data Commons) to provide an automatic upgrade clause? Then nothing need be deleted. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] How to start to remove non-CT compliant data..
Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net writes: Why not do what Wikipedia did and work together with the licence authors I expressly asked this a couple of years ago: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-February/001971.html and was told no: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2009-February/001982.html Right. But since then the situation has changed. CC have made clear they're committed to supporting the use of CC licences (including BY-SA) for databases. Version 4 of the licence would be an excellent opportunity to make the kinds of changes that would improve it for OSM (even though, in my view, version 2 of CC-BY-SA has served us well so far). More broadly, having two separate copyleft silos for open data can't be in anyone's interest and we should try to get compatibility or a merger between the CC and ODC share-alike licences. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [osmf-talk] Membership applications from Skobbler employees
Hasn't it happened in the past that large numbers of Cloudmade employees have joined the OSMF? That didn't cause the organization to be somehow subverted, and neither will people who work for Skobbler (or Microsoft, or whoever). -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Osmf-talk] Membership applications from Skobbler employees
Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com writes: This was completely easy in the past, but is it realistic to keep OSMF relatively unimportant if it is rights holder for all the data? It might be better to spin off a separate organization which is the rights holder, separate from the less contentious OSMF functions like providing funding to keep the servers running or organizing SoTM. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] I want my access back
Robert Kaiser kairo@... writes: Well, IIRC that's exactly one of the points of the CTs, granting the OSMF the right to allow exemptions in some cases. Although the OSMF is sub-licensing the map and so could sub-license under any terms (including 'ODbL with the following list of clarifications'), in the contributor terms the OSMF promised to use a particular set of licences - and the CTs don't allow the OSMF to issue amendments or clarifications to the licences. So, in order for some clarification such as the exact meaning of 'produced work' to be adopted, it still has to be agreed by every contributor. (Or else, a 2/3 vote of active contributors would allow 'ODbL with clarifications' to be used as the official licence.) It's all a bit muddy. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] A case for CT + CC-BY-SA
Tobias Knerr osm@... writes: * Inadequate protection * CC-BY-SA might not work for data. OSM data is not currently abused in a manner that threatens the project, and that might never even happen. Nevertheless, it seems wise to make sure that we can either prevent this or at least react when it happens. It is true that, by continuing to offer the database under CC-BY-SA, we would no longer /preemptively/ address this potential issue. I have commissioned a law firm in the UK, and one in the US, to investigate the extent to which this may be the case. I have asked them to look at whether the OSM map data falls under copyright, and additionally whether the contract- law provisions in the ODbL add anything to enforceability. The objective is to get analysis which can be shared with the whole community, rather than privileged legal advice which must remain confidential. This includes disclosing how the law firm was chosen and the questions asked. Making contributors agree to the CT gives us the ability to react *if* legal weaknesses of the CC-BY-SA are actually abused at some future point, though, and I believe that this is sufficient. Personally I agree with this (as with everything else you wrote) but some prefer a more aggressive approach. -- Ed Avis e...@waniassset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and ODbL OK
Steve Coast steve@... writes: I'm curious how the OSMF saying something magically makes it more valid than the LWG saying it, given the LWG is a body run by... the OSMF? Steve you recently mentioned that you couldn't speak for the OSMF without going to the OSMF board. Might the same apply to the LWG? If the answer is no, and the LWG is authorized to make statements such as an interpretation of the contributor terms without a separate say-so from the OSMF board, then it would be good to make that explicit. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-talk] Obvious turn restrictions
Nathan Edgars II neroute2 at gmail.com writes:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1591319/history
North Elk Vale has been split into three ways with four relations on
each side of the overpass. And for what? To prevent a router from
telling you to turn right in the wrong part of the intersection?
I think the essential problem is that you need to split a way into several bits
to add these restrictions. It would be better if the schema for restrictions
didn't require you to break ways in two. For example it might take a 'from' and
'to' way, an intersection node and an optional direction such as 'northbound'
to disambiguate. That is slightly unclean in a strict geodata sense but
perhaps better than the death by a thousand cuts we currently suffer when
modelling complex junctions with the need to split a way at each point there is
a junction node with some kind of restriction.
That's just one idea. Another would be a 'lightweight' turn restriction schema,
supplementing but not replacing the existing one, where properties can be tagged
on the node itself ('no_turn', 'no_right_turn_northbound') avoiding the need
for relations at all.
Or perhaps editors just need better support for editing ways as a group to cope
with the reality that things tend to get chopped into smaller and smaller bits
as the map improves.
--
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Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and ODbL OK
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: Ordnance Survey has explicitly considered any licensing conflict between their license and ODbL and has no objections to geodata derived in part from OS OpenData being released under the Open Database License 1.0. As I understand it the objection was not so much whether the data can be distributed under the ODbL but whether the contributor terms (which under some reasonable interpretations allow OSMF to distribute under a different licence in future) are compatible. You have previously given your personal interpretation of the CTs, which is that a contributor need only assert that data is compatible with the *current* licence terms (and so might be incompatible with some putative future licence). Will there be official confirmation from OSMF backing up this interpretation? If not, is there a means for people to click 'I accept the CTs, subject to the interpretation posted on the talk-gb mailing list'? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Copyright issues of checking details on other websites
My rule of thumb is that getting facts from an individual website for a cafe or shop or church is fine, but do not copy from online directories or the databases maintained by search engines. If adding details from a website I will usually note it in the 'source' or 'uri' tags, or in the changeset comment, to provide some evidence that I found it independently and didn't just copy off Google. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] UK road name coverage now over 80%
Graham Stewart (GrahamS graham@... writes: I just noticed that todays http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/osm_analysis/main ITO Analysis Summary shows we are now over 80% for road name completion (i.e. OSM road names compared to the OS Locator data). Is it possible to analyse how much of that is independently surveyed and how much is just copied from OS? (I know that some mappers have not added source tags when copying from OS, and going through changeset comments is probably too hard, but it would give a rough idea.) Even if you're in favour of armchair mapping, I think most agree that copying the names from the OS map is just 'phase 1', with the next and much more time- consuming step being to go out and resurvey to make sure. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] License compatibility clarification
Jonas Häggqvist rasher@... writes: Is the CT/ODbL compatible with CC-BY-SA? Say if an organization releases some data under CC-BY-SA, could we use it (in the CT/ODbL future)? If this were possible, then there would be no need for any relicensing exercise. The data released under CC-BY-SA would be the existing OSM map, and it could just be used directly with CT/ODbL. The fact that this is not happening shows that, as generally believed, it is not possible to accept CC-BY-SA licensed data under a CT/ODbL regime. -- Ed Avis e...@waniassset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Re-using ODbL for other, similiar project?
Please also consider using a simple permissive licence for your project such as CC0. You might find that the extra complexity of a big licence such as the ODbL is not worth it. It's your call - I just want to point out that alternatives are available (many of which are compatible with the ODbL for those using your data). The Creative Commons project also has several licences which they encourage as being suitable for data as well as for creative works. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Is it a temporary file or Derivative Database under ODbL
I would like to suggest the continuation of dual-licensing under CC-BY-SA in addition to ODbL. Then, anyone who is currently making use of OSM will be able to continue doing so with no legal worries. There would then be a choice of two ways to use the OSM map data: - old-style share-alike: your final result must be distributed under CC-BY-SA (which is fine for many in the existing OSM community, but not attractive to many commercial users) - new-style 'produced work' under ODbL: you don't have to distribute the final work under any particular licence, but you must share the derived database and tools needed. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Re-using ODbL for other, similiar project?
Willy willy@... writes: Question 1: May I copy and re-use the ODbL text for my project? Is the license itself free? Yes, I believe so, although I do not see an explicit statement on http://www.opendatacommons.org/ or in the licence text. Actually I inherited the database after the creator passed away some time ago. Back then he told me that all data in that database is either from free sources or had been collected by contributors. However, he neither had/demanded something like ODbL's Terms of Contribution nor archived the cotribution postings. So I have no objective evidence for the data source. I don't believe the ODbL has any 'terms of contribution'. Those are a separate idea thought up by the OSM project. But yes, in general it would be a good idea to check that you have permission to release your project under this licence. Question 2: Under those circumstances, would you recommend not to add the data to OSM? That's not really a legal question but an organizational one. Note, however, that just releasing your project under ODbL might not be enough to allow its incorporation into the OSM project, which has its own set of contributor terms. You might also consider releasing as public domain. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and accepting the new contributor terms
Steve Coast steve@... writes: I can't make a statement for the OSMF without going to the board, but that's my understanding, Mike is correct. Would this not resolve the Nearmap question? As I understand it they did not want to write a blank cheque allowing use under an unspecified licence. But if the only requirement is to be compatible with CC-BY-SA and ODbL/DbCL, they might be happy to reinstate permission to use their imagery. Potentially, there are other data sources in a similar situation. An official statement from the OSMF confirming this interpretation of the CTs (or, better still, a clarifying paragraph added to the CTs themselves) might clear up a lot of non-acceptances. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS OpenData and accepting the new contributor terms
Michael Collinson mike@... writes: In other words, for the LWG, if data is compatible with *current* license terms, then there is no problem contributing it and accepting the contributor terms. This is a nice explanation. Could it be added as a clarifying paragraph to the contributor terms themselves? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-talk] Can I say yes to the ODbL if I can't account for 100% of my data?
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason avarab at gmail.com writes: I've been away for a while. But it seems to me from reading the terms that I can't say yes to them in good faith, not because I don't want to, but because I remember I derived a few things from external CC-BY-SA, and I can't now recall what they were (and this was before we had changeset comments). If it's the case that geodata is not covered by copyright (the main justification for the licence change), and therefore CC-BY-SA is not enforceable, you need not worry. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Source tags and changesets (was ... ODbL ...)
Tobias Knerr osm at tobias-knerr.de writes: I put source tags on changesets now. That sounds like a great idea. (Does Merkaartor have support for this?) I do worry that people who've grown accustomed to seeing the tag on each object would be less happy at having to dig through the object history. Do some OSM editors have convenient support for clicking on an object and seeing at once all the changeset tags that apply to it at the same time as the object's own tags? A source=Bing;survey does /not/ tell you that addr:housenumber=72 was surveyed and roof:color=red was determined by looking at Bing images. People have developed elaborate schemes like source:name which in principle could be extended to source:roof:color=Bing. But it seems silly to do this manually when it could automatically be determined from the changesets. This is not really a technical question but one of convention: are per-changeset source tags generally accepted practice in the project these days? And is there a way to retrospectively add tags to existing changesets? (I have always noted 'Bing' or 'OS' or 'mapping trip' in the changeset comment but it would be nice to go back and tag this in machine-readable form.) What follows is general fat-chewing about how we map. I tend to group my edits into sensible changesets anyway and rarely use more than one source for each changeset. That's often my practice too; even when using Bing imagery after a survey I will make one 'pass' across the area tracing and then a second pass adding the surveyed names and POIs. I've developed a habit to trace the buildings in an area from Bing, then go out and survey the area in order to add house numbers and other attributes to the buildings (and make sure that the imagery wasn't bogus). Curiously enough I usually do it the other way: survey first and then trace Bing imagery once I get home, before uploading the survey as a separate changeset. On the other hand, if adding missing roads from the United Kingdom's Ordnance Survey data, I will trace first and then survey (perhaps some time later...). -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[Talk-GB] Hosting OS OpenData files (was: OSM Analysis New Data and bot)
I don't have enough free time right now to set up a mirror but I am more than willing to chip in if it's merely a question of paying to upgrade bandwidth available on a hosting solution like S3. I know this isn't a big contribution but it might be something. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[Talk-GB] Video tutorials (was: OSM Analysis New Data and bot)
Note that David Ellams is one step ahead and has already created some video tutorials on how to use Potlatch 2. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Video_tutorials That's only one piece of the puzzle. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Housing Development Names
Kev js1982 osm@... writes: The current tagging is is_in:Gamston, West Bridgford place:suburb name:Knightshayes landuse:residential I would suggest removing place=suburb but leaving the name tag. Then it gets a reasonably tasteful and low-key rendering in the both the OSM Mapnik tiles and the cycle map. This is not merely tagging for the renderer, since the place is not really a 'suburb' if I understand you correctly. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: Worcester is nominally complete; yet despite the assurances of people in this thread that completeness will bring more mappers, Worcester has just one mapper, Steve, who was active anyway before OSSV came along. I would not claim that completing one particular town will have a significant effect on the number of OSM users and hence the number of contributors. It is positive, but what really matters is improving the 'worst-case performance' of OSM nationally. If you pick some metric such as ITO's OS Locator comparison (for want of a better metric), then I contend that what matters for OSM adoption is not the places at the top of the list but the one at the very bottom. If we can improve the worst place in the country from 35% completion to 90%, OSM use will greatly increase and so will the pool of contributors. I appreciate that this is not directly testable except by doing it. As SteveC noted, most claims about imports require a parallel universe to check. When the area near my house in East London became complete (from survey and Yahoo; this was before the days of OS) then the number of local mappers *decreased*. Of course, because the area was pretty much done, I concentrated my mapping trips on places further afield. If having an area complete means that a contributor can spend his or her time on other parts of the map which also need attention, that must be a good thing. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Richard Fairhurst richard@... writes: This is no doubt true. But surely having an area that has been *surveyed* to 100% road name completion is just as likely to put off any new contributors as one that was *traced* to 100%? I don't think so. Again, the difference is that you're reaching 100% with the involvement of numerous people, rather than 100% with the involvement of one importer. And when you have that vibrant community, it's self-sustaining. I think we all agree that reaching 100% completeness with a collection of people doing diverse surveying methods (and even aerial tracing) is much better than reaching 90% completeness by importing. (The OS data is not 100% complete so it can never take us all the way to 100%, except by the limited metric of comparing ourselves to OS.) But you are leaving out the third possibility which is an area stuck at 40% completion, which doesn't have a vibrant community either. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Graham Stewart graham@... writes: That raises the question of why on earth we're still using cliquey semi-private email lists when we could be using nice open public forums with categories, threaded discussions, formatting and voting - but that is a discussion for another day. ;) I use Gmane: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.openstreetmap.region.gb -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: 1) A list of not:names that orginated from OS Locator but where OS Locator does not currently contain that error. The challenge is that not all not:name entries in OSM will have originated from error in OS Locator; they could contain details of errors from other sources, such as Navteq or TeleAtlas or elsewhere. Uhh... what? Is anybody updating the OSM map based on comparison with proprietary maps such as Navteq? I thought we didn't do that. Sometimes I find cases where the OSM name was wrong. When correcting it I add the old value as an incorrect_name tag. I suppose that some people might be using not:name for that purpose. 2) A list of street names which are in OSM but which are not in OS Locator could be a good publicity tool for OSM and a good new source of errors for elements of a way (for example where a short section of a street associated with a bridge but the other way had a typo in OSM). I guess that needs would ideally have its own rendering layer? Yes, it would be a separate report and layer from the usual comparison. Finally. Might it be useful for us to accommodate have multiple not:name entries associated with a single road? For example where a single street has multiple different duff names from one or more different sources, ie OS Locator and Navteq both have different wrong names. Again could you explain where you're coming from with Navteq, etc? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: I have not used commercial mapping while creating the map, but some errors in Navteq, TeleAtlas and AA naming locally have subsequently come to my attention subsequently and I see no reason why these should not be in also included in not:name. It certainly doesn't break any copyright to do so and provides strong evidence that we are doing proper surveying rather than copying. I'm no lawyer so I cannot tell you that what you are doing is infringing copyright. But I think it is better to take a strict clean-room approach. You may be disciplined when looking at the Navteq maps side-by-side with OSM; you may know exactly how far you can go in adding information based on them; but I think it would be better to stick to a simple and clear policy of never using other maps unless we know the copyright status is okay. To my mind, adding not:name from Navteq may provide evidence that we are surveying - but it also provides evidence that we are looking at Navteq's maps! That makes it harder to argue independent creation if for any reason our map starts to closely resemble Navteq's and they allege copying. For example: Navteq (and Bing) incorrectly name the section of Nacton Road in Ipswich from the junction with Felixstowe Road heading east as Clapgate Lane. It isn't. It might be appropriate therefore to add a not:name entry to OSM at that point with a not:name:note saying that Navteq has a wrong. I think I might tag this if I saw widespread usage in web pages or secondary sources using the wrong name. But I would prefer not to know which particular proprietary map the error originated from. I'd suggest we reserve not:name for the OS Locator check, since that's overwhelmingly what it is used for - even if the tag name doesn't make that clear - and if there is a need to tag 'commonly used but wrong name' for a street we use something else like incorrect_name. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Peter Miller peter.miller@... writes: I have not used commercial mapping while creating the map, but some errors in Navteq, TeleAtlas and AA naming locally have subsequently come to my attention subsequently and I see no reason why these should not be in also included in not:name. That makes it harder to argue independent creation if for any reason our map starts to closely resemble Navteq's and they allege copying. I hear your concern. You will notice that I hadn't added that information and am not rushing to do us. OK. I may have made the common mistake of confusing the discussion of an action on the mailing list with the performance of that action. Can we agree, then, that it's a bad idea to tag anything in OSM that comes directly from proprietary maps such as Navteq - even if minor things like notes of errors in the other map - and so for any check of OS Locator versus OSM, we don't need to worry about not:name tags that might have been added for Navteq, because there won't be any. Thanks again (to you and your employees) for your work on these comparisons. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Jason Cunningham jamicuosm@... writes: I'd also like to give my support to using a bot to add names to existing roads. 1 - It would reduce foot surveys which would mean missing out on POI's (etc). Now feel this argument is short sighted and we would still have to deal with how we map POI when all streets are surveyed, so that should not stop us using the OS data. I would like to note that for me, using the OS data has been a great way to increase foot surveys. There are many areas which looked complete on the map, until OS showed that lots of roads (or public buildings) were missing. Adding those roads has spurred me to visit the areas on foot to mop up unnamed streets and to hunt down places of worship among other things. Different sources are complementary to each other and should not be viewed as alternatives. Even with 'classic OSM' we had Yahoo tracing combined with foot surveys. So this weekend I could go out and get names for remaining streets in my area, or we could use the bot... Please remember that you can do both - you can still visit to map by hand before or after adding information from OS or any other source. You might instead decide to concentrate your mapping time on those things that we can't get from OS as a first priority. But at least you are able to make an informed choice. However, to make sure that people have all the information when deciding what to go out and map, and to accommodate those who have quite reasonable concerns about ending up duplicating mistakes in the OS data, we need tools which show which parts of the map come from OS. ITO's map layer http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/ito_map/main?view=117 is an example. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Chris Hill osm@... writes: Since it looks likely that a bot is going to be run to add OS Locator names to unnamed British roads - something I strongly disagree with, but I can't stop - I demand that it is tagged with a common-sense, clear tag to show where this has happened. This should not be the bonkers cock-up that was described in the speed limit nonsense, and not a source tag, since many existing roads will have a source tag, e.g. source=survey. Would a tag source:name=OS be specific enough? Perhaps - and I'm just suggesting this as a possibility - the name could be added as unverified_name=X or name:OS=X or some other scheme. Then users of the OSM data could decide for themselves whether they strictly insist on ground survey (at the expense of coverage completeness) or whether they'd like to have the most complete set of names, even if some of them have only been surveyed by Ordnance Survey employees rather than OSM volunteers. I don't think that's a great idea, because the name is the name, and if we have good evidence that the name is X then we should just tag name=X. But it could be a way to keep everyone reasonably happy. When going on mapping trips I would then concentrate mostly on roads with no name at all, but also take a moment to verify the OS-sourced names as I passed those roads. I think this would be more efficient and produce a better map faster than if we ignore the OS names entirely. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: When there are no names on a street, it gives a good incentive to go survey them, and it shows which things *need* to be surveyed. Quite right. How can we improve OSM coverage for end users (who would like to find their destination address when navigating, for example, and would not be impressed by their sat-nav device loading up Potlatch and telling them to edit) and yet keep the traditional setup for mappers where 'no name = go and visit'? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Derick Rethans osm@... writes: There is a substantial body of evidence that automated imports damage the ability to recruit and nuture new mappers. Could you cite the evidence? I can. I've a friend in the Netherlands that I'd say is the typical person that we want as mapper. He had mapped a lot of town Which then got wiped out by the AND import, and he didn't bother with OSM for a looong time. That's a good piece of evidence but if you look carefully I think what it says is that you should not wipe out existing mapping when doing an import. They must be knitted in with manual attention where necessary and not just dumped from a great height onto the map. In this context I don't believe anyone is advocating the replacement of any bits of the existing OSM map with OS data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
Andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: One other point: there may be parts of the UK where mapping is lost because someone doesn’t relicense and there are other contributors whose work has had the rug pulled under it but are willing to rebuild if there’s a way to make it as easy as possible. That assumes that the OS licence is compatible with the new contributor terms, which (as discussed at recent LWG meeting) is still not settled! -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis updated with new OS Locator data and a review of progress to date
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: I wonder if the good folks at ITO could devise a way to analyse the not:name tags in the database and see whether any of them are now redundant? In other words, are the OS correcting any of the mistakes we appear to have identified? It would be cool to see a comparison the other way round: testing the OS data for accuracy using OSM as a reference. In inner London I think there are about 5% of names missing from OS - mostly semi-private drives or estates, but nonetheless signposted and addressable - so I think they would score no higher than 95%. (OS Street View is a bit better, I'd say that only about 2% of roads that exist are missing from it, and the 'false positive rate' of Street View showing a road where nothing is on the ground is almost nil. It's not as easy to do automated comparisons however. These numbers are totally off the top of my head and apply to London only.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Frederik Ramm frederik@... writes: 3. OSMF to choose a new license that is free and open, present it to OSM community for vote, and get 2/3 of active mappers to agree with the new license. This is the only bit that is new, and the 2/3 of mappers hurdle can hardly be called allow the board to tweak the license. The process is pretty simple really: - decide what licence you want without bothering to hold a vote - get everyone to sign up to new contributor terms allowing that licence - block anyone who says no from contributing and presto! you have your 2/3 majority of active contributors. Of course the OSMF would never do anything like that... -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Grant Slater openstreetmap@... writes: - block anyone who says no from contributing and presto! you have your 2/3 majority of active contributors. Reality check... So to steal all our precious data and kick the majority of the contributors the stupid evil OSMF you propose would have to shut down people contributing and joining OSM for 9 MONTHS before they could run such a rigged system. You're right, it is a fanciful and unrealistic example, at least from the point of view of keeping a running OSM project with contributors. It would be a way to get a static copy of the map under any terms wanted. However, what I hope people realize is that these 'evil conspiracy theory' arguments are the same ones used to assert that CC-BY-SA doesn't protect the data, any company could just copy it, and so on, despite not a shred of evidence that this has happened. I wish people would apply a more realistic perspective and 'assume good faith' a little bit more in these matters too. All I intended to demonstrate is that no amount of legalese and boilerplate in the licence or contributor terms will block out all possible abuses, so we should lighten up a bit. But you're right and I apologize for the unwarranted snarkiness. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Matt Amos zerebubuth@... writes: i've heard the 'CC-BY-SA doesn't protect the data' argument coming not only from lawyers, but also from Creative Commons itself! I would be interested to read that. My understanding is that Creative Commons have affirmed what has demonstrably been the case all along - that CC-BY-SA certainly can be used for data, as OSM is doing now. They noted that it would not magically extend copyright to things not covered by copyright. That is quite true, but it does not mean that map data is not covered by copyright. If we have a legal opinion stating that, it would be wonderful to publish it now and clean up the whole mess. (It would also greatly help with people using external data sources, if we knew that copyright does not apply.) -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
Matt Amos zerebubuth@... writes: also the VP of science commons did say [2]: I'm going to be a little provocative here and say that your data is already unprotected [under CC-BY-SA], and you cannot slap a license on it and protect it. ... That means I'm free to ignore any kind of share-alike you apply to your data. I've got a download of the OSM data dump. I can repost it, right now, as public domain. Thanks, that's interesting. Although he didn't in fact carry out his threat... -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Airspace Co.
Tom Hughes tom at compton.nu writes: I think the important question is whether mapping airspace causes any harm to people who don't care about airspace. I believe Frederik covered that when he mentioned the problems of having lots of objects criss-crossing areas that people are trying to work on and how the pollution of the airspace things make that hard. That is a good point. I experience the same thing with underground railways and other miscellany. The proliferation of extra nodes and ways makes editing difficult. However, I would suggest that this is not a particularly hard problem to solve; the editor can hide all nodes with a certain tag or put them in a different layer. Currently, available editors don't do that. The question is whether to forbid tagging airspace (or water pipes, or contour lines, or whatever) for the time being until editor support is available for keeping the work separate - or whether to let it be for now and wait for editors to catch up in due course. Telling other people to stop mapping something which they are interested in needs a very good reason and a high burden of proof. And while airspace does seem a bit pointless to you and me, no doubt the people mapping it have good reasons. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Phase 4 and what it means
I don't think that edit wars to deliberately change the licence status of bits of map are the way forward - for either side. It's just as unacceptable from the pro-ODbL camp as from the pro-CC camp. However, I can understand that if mappers believe that large amounts of data will be deleted (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent) then they will want to recreate it. One way might be to create a second, 'ODbL-pure' database where there is full licence to rip out anything from contributors who don't support the ODbL change. Then if this version of the map becomes better than the current OSM it can replace it. Indeed, that could be a gradual changeover rather than a big bang. None of this reduces the need to reach out to all contributors, whichever side of the licensing debate they are on, and for all sides to find a constructive way forward rather than hardening positions and seeing who blinks first. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] naming an item in multiple languages
Robin Paulson robin.paulson at gmail.com writes: so, when i name it, i get something like this: name:en=Mount Eden name:mi=Maungawhau so, what do i put for name=? Put whatever you like - the important thing is that you have unambiguously tagged both the English and Maori names, so people with a preference for one language or the other can be sure of seeing the one they want. Some countries like Belgium have a convention of gluing together two names with a hyphen character and putting that in the name tag. Personally, I don't like that; it seems like tagging for the renderer rather than tagging what is semantically correct. You might want to follow the conventions used by existing paper maps in your country. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] How to deal with versioning
Martijn van Exel m at rtijn.org writes: 1A building object is being imported from an open public sector dataset 2The building receives some modifications by human contributors (attributes, geometry, or both) 3A new version of the public sector data becomes available and is imported. Currently, in step 3. the human contributions would be lost, This is why doing an 'import' of external data is not possible, except when there is no existing data in OSM that overlaps. Rather, the external data needs to be reconciled against OSM and 'merged' rather than imported. Conflicts would usually need to be fixed manually. However, for specialized data you can tag in a separate namespace where it's generally understood that changes should be made in the upstream data source (and thus fed back to OSM in due course) rather than in OSM directly. The NaPTAN bus stop import in the United Kingdom is like this: it uses 'naptan:' tags which are not changed by mappers directly. However, that setup is not an option for bread-and-butter things like road layout and naming, where we want everybody to be able to edit the map. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [Talk-GB] Essex appearing in various London address nominatim results
Martin - CycleStreets list-osm-talk-gb@... writes: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/26450045 I think there will be a polygon for Essex, thus the above node can simply be deleted. This is the case in a lot of similar cases, as more exact data is now available. It has been discussed and agreed on this list before that these nodes can be junked now that we have county boundaries as polygons. So please go ahead. -- Ed Avis e...@waniassset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Kent Pharmacy, OSM Validation
TimSC mapping@... writes: I have done further investigations. As I said, the national dataset has about 90% of pharmacies exactly located. But in the Kent data set does not include this precise data and instead has the postcode centre as the pharmacy position. IMHO, if we can get permission for the national level data set, we should import/merge the good 90% (and manually survey the remainder). If pharmacies are just points with lat/lon, it is not always simple to import into the existing map, even if we knew the position were entirely accurate. The road network in OSM has some margin for error so a pharmacy might end up on the wrong side of the road. In areas with buildings, the pharmacy node might appear in the next-door building by mistake. That said, if you are looking for a pharmacy, it is certainly more useful to have one within a five metre accuracy rather than no data at all. So I would still be in favour of adding the data. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
[OSM-talk] Generation of 3D models from aerial photos
This looks interesting: http://www.smartertechnology.com /c/a/Smarter-Strategies/Cloud-Makes-3D-Models-from-Ariel-Photos/ -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [Talk-GB] Kent Open Data, KCC
Clearly the local authority must have a list of all taxable addresses, with house number and postcode. If it can be safely released (just the address, with no other identifying information) then it would be a great completeness check for OSM, even better than OS Locator. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Opendata names copied in Harrow
Andrew andrewhainosm@... writes: An editor has cleared the OSL difference analysis in the London Borough of Harrow (http://www.itoworld.com/product/data/osm_analysis/area?name=Harrow) with the unusually low score of 5 not:names out of 1800. Do you mean that names have been entered where none existed before - or do you mean changing already-mapped names to agree with OS? -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: e.g.http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=50.9256lon=-1.3605zoom=14layers=M It's not really 'the' C351, as there will be C351s all over the country. In that case local_ref would be a more appropriate tag than ref. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] OS Opendata names copied in Harrow
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: It may be because I am a linguist, but I cannot bring myself to declare such forms as ST JOHN'S ROAD to be incorrect when they make much more sense grammatically. ...unless they are St Andrews Road or St Albans Road. Often if you look hard enough you can see an older street sign with an apostrophe, before the local authority became illiterate and stopped bothering with them. I take that as enough reason to tag the correct name. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
In general it would be good to distinguish between what is signed and what is known to be true, though it may not be signed. Ultimately, road signs and street nameplates could be mapped as separate objects, though that might be going a bit far. In country areas there are many road names known to locals but not signed at all. A navigation app might not bother to say 'turn left down Lewsley Lane' if it knows that there is no marker on the ground to help a driver find it. But then, it would still be useful to show the name in local maps or tourist guides. In cities, if a street has no name sign anywhere I will tag unsigned=yes. In the countryside, having no sign is the common case so I don't usually add the tag. Similarly there are old hotels which still have the name carved in stone above the doorway but are nowadays used for something else. Nobody would put that into the name tag but it might possibly be useful for 'name_sign' or 'signed:name' or various increasingly complex tag schemes. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Craig Wallace craigw84@... writes: There is a proposed unsigned=yes tag on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Noname But that is not very helpful, as it doesn't specify whether it is the ref or the name (or something else) that is unsigned. Something like unsigned:name=yes or unsigned:ref=yes would be better. I think this is a good idea, with plain unsigned=yes taken to mean that neither the name nor the ref or any other unique identification is signed. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] C roads
Steve Doerr doerr.stephen@... writes: But sooner or later someone will tag something as unsigned=no. Double negatives seem faintly ridiculous to me. Why not replace unsigned=yes with signed=no? Seems more logical to me. Perhaps, but unsigned=yes already has some momentum and it's not worth changing. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
