Jérome Armau wrote:
Basically, even if the data itself is public domain, the database that contains it may be protected under EU law - this is to protect the amount of work that went into the data collection. The whole issue is the definition of a "substantial part" of the database. Are street names a substantial part of the street view data?
Since the information displayed in an image has not been 'collected into a database' what is the problem? It is just raw material that still needs to be processed and in many cases it does not even tie up with even googles own search results. So providing an alternative database of information which corrects that information is simply common sense. And I don't accept that the fact that google have 'geo-referenced' the images comes into it since I normally have to scroll through several locations before finding the appropriate data, just as I scroll through several pages of results or browse several folders of pictures to get the right material. At some point it would be nice if we could link to alternate data sources direct from the map, but providing that via an alternate database such as nominatim just reinforces the fact that we ARE building an alternate database ...
Of cause in the UK once the street gazetteer is made open access the problem of street names becomes academic, and hopefully that will not be long coming as well. At which time the NLPG data may also be available, and we can start feeding corrections back into that!
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