On 04/03/2015 02:41 AM, stevea wrote:
Erring on the side of "high ground" safety might be
a good place to plant an initial flag, but if it's location is wrong and
> we need to move it to a more accurate place, we must do so.
And Frederik Ramm replied:
Frankly - no. OSM does not depend on the inclusion of third party data
sources for its quality. Taking a "high ground safety" approach with
regards to third-party rights in data might cut us off from some third
party data sources but then re-publishing these third party sources in
OSM clothes doesn't do us much good anyway.
Concerning the improvement of truly noisy TIGER rail data in the USA
so that it becomes less noisy, correctly named infrastructure, yes,
it does do us good. If we're going to have imported data (we do,
here, in one case it is TIGER, and TIGER has significant errors), and
if observations of "facts about the world" can improve these, then
not only should we improve these, we should also not have
proclamations that this "doesn't do us much good." To be clear:
cleaning up noisy data (something I strive to do, and have with much
success for years) DOES do us much good.
If an individual is desperate to use a third party data source, let them
do the due diligence on the legality of the source, but it certainly
isn't "us" who must move our flag to make it (even) easier to swamp us
with (often low quality) third-party data.
Now, wait a minute. #1: I am not desperate. These incorrect TIGER
rail data have been aging for years. It is high time, no, perhaps
even overdue that we correct them. #2: The data source is not third
party, these are "facts about the world" just as a hedgerow might
grow along a fence line. If my government employees publish data
which confirm my corrections (and they do, so I do) that is not
"third party" any more than the TIGER data already ARE "third party"
(they came from the US Department of Commerce via census taking).
#3: OSM-US has a legal team, and in my opinion, part of their
responsibility is to make determinations about the legality of
categories of data and whether it is legal to enter into OSM. This
includes the vital category of "facts about the world."
> It sounds like it is getting a bit shrill. I'll say it again: I wish
light, not heat.
I would be absolutely thrilled if more people, especially more
Americans, would stop thinking about what data they could take and add
to OSM, and instead grab a GPS, or their car, or their boots, or
bicycle, or mobile phone, or all of that, and simply map stuff.
Frederik, I have entered thousands of such data into OSM: I
regularly hike wilderness (in my boots, with my GPS) and park trails
and my mapping efforts as the fruits of having done so self-document.
I don't want to deign responding further to characterizations of my
mapping as either "good, because I went outside" and "bad, because I
sit in a chair." OSM needs good quality data. Period. It matters
that they don't come from copyrighted sources, but beyond that, if
they are good quality data (or improve low quality data to high) then
it truly doesn't matter.
It seems to me that in the USA, what people think about OSM is one of
these two:
This is vast oversimplification and I won't deign to reply, as others
have and it just simply isn't true.
The idea that you could also roll up your sleeves and map your own
backyeard, village, town, or city quarter, instead of copying from
official bicycle route publications, official railway brochures, or
stuff that the administration has done, seems to occur to very few
people, and others will say: "OpenStreetMap is cool, but I don't think
that actually going out and doing a survey is a good use of my time".
I've done hundreds of such surveys, put the resulting data into OSM
after editing them to the highest quality my instruments and skills
allow, and have never once had them challenged like that. To hear
you say that such things happen seems like fanciful imaginings. Take
a look at my city and county (Santa Cruz) and the Gold Star Award at
BestOfOSM we have won (one of only a handful in North America) and
our county wiki page. Sure, I'm standing on many shoulders of many
other OSM volunteers as I say this, but I've done yeoman work in this
project, much of it from rolling up my sleeves and mapping my
backyard, city and county. I, and we in the USA, are not either/or,
one/or the the other. I'm almost tempted to say "How dare you" but
it's inflammatory to do that, so I won't.
I'm really sad that time and time again we have to fight about whether
or not a specific source is permitted to be used in OSM, when we could
just collect the facts ourselves and therefore be completely free of any
legal implications (and also free of errors that others may have made).
Well, I'm sad that there is so much heat and what looks like very
little light, it's true. I like to think of everybody on this list
as "on the same team" where we all work toward the lofty goal of a
fantastic map made by volunteers. In the interest of "still want to
see brighter light," I'll close by saying that discussing particular
data sources is STILL a sometimes ticklish part of OSM, and that we
can and should discuss these matters in a forum like talk-us. I hope
we can continue to do so with positive, enLIGHTening results that
move us forward in productive and positive ways.
Regards,
SteveA
California
_______________________________________________
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
