2012/7/31 Bruno Remy <bremy.qc...@gmail.com>: > what!? do you mean "open"streetmap denies "open"data !!!? Come on! it's a > joke?
Dear Bruno, This is an old topic. I'll summarize for you. In short, yes, the OpenStreetMap community does reject a class of Open Data. We don't want data in OSM that we aren't welcome to have. Some data in incompatible because it is improperly licensed, low quality, uninteresting or unsuitable for other reasons. Here is more detail about the license problem. Yes, it is wonderful that governments at all levels are learning about the benefits of Open Data but governments are struggling to participate effectively in the global Open Data environment. The worst thing to happen in the Canadian Open Data environment was the city of Vancouver. They wrote their own data license, and it was a terrible, regressive document. Sadly, it was a terrible, regressive document that had a lot of promotion behind it and several other municipalities duplicated the Vancouver errors. That set the Canadian municipal Open Data movement back by at least two years. Finally, now, municipalities are realizing the critical failure of writing their own license and the benefit of adopting a common license, drafted and maintained by international data law experts. Slowly, municipalities are replacing their failed custom licenses with something less-horrible. We would have more data to consider, if more municipalities had followed the excellent lead of Surrey, BC and Langley Township, BC. Even if the license problems of municipal data could be solved instantly, there is the matter of "suitability for OpenStreetMap". You must be aware of and follow completely the import guidelines if you wish to include data from external sources in OpenStreetMap. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import_guidelines _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list Talk-ca@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
