On 25 March 2010 19:13, Claudius <claudiu...@gmx.de> wrote: > Am 25.03.2010 15:09, Gaz Davidson: >> (...) at some later time the positions of all >> known access points can be estimated and imported into OSM's database. > > I think WiFi are too temporary a feature to be added to the main OSM > database. Why not keep it in a seperate project database?
I suppose I could keep it separate, but it sucks to have all kinds of city geo-data split across multiple databases in different formats. It makes using them more awkward. Also, I've not seen any evidence that a large number of open wireless networks are temporary, unless you mean that the technology ages fast? All the ones I've found are deliberately open and belong to businesses, at least in the UK it's no longer the open wifi free-for-all that it was several years ago (all new routers come with WEP enabled by default, access points are used until the hardware dies). Perhaps store the last seen date, then we can auto-purge them from the database. Maybe have the site collect complete user traces so that we can see when people went past a now dead hotspot (though users may not like this, specially if the data is PD!) > Besides: Nice idea. But will it be needed in times of 3G access? Well, you could say the same about amenity=phone_box, I can't remember the last time I used one of those. Open wireless networks are of interest to me personally, probably lots of other people too. When I'm out and about and realise I need a 700MB file it doesn't make sense to use 3G for this. On my old prepay plan it would have cost me £14 to download 700MB, on my current contract it would eat a week's worth of data allowance. Gaz _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
