Hi there, I am a colleage of Max's and we collaborated on his labelling
papers. Chiming in to straighten up some potential miscommunications.
Am 13.07.2013 20:36, schrieb Christoph Hormann:
But i would actually emphasize a more practical point: Since this is
meant to be scientific research one can assume you publish it to allow
others to independently verify your work, compare it to their own and
possibly improve it - this is in the very definition of scientific
work. When dealing with fairly complex algorithms like here this is
next to impossible to do without publishing the code.
Just wanted to point out that "fairly complex algorithms" are actually
not published the way you assume, although I totally see your point.
Some context: map labelling is a popular subject for computational
geometry and GIScience people. And they do not usually produce or share
fully-fledged frameworks, but algorithms in pseudo-code with complexity
analysis in Big O notation and/or pragmatic runtime analysis as
empirical exploration with a sample implementation.
The whole point of algorithms research is to move beyond implementation
and do research, well on algorithms, instead of software libraries.
That Max has a very stable and functional framework is uncommon for the
scientific community.
And he built that framework mostly in his free time over the years to
better test his hypotheses & results.
Now i understand you might be reluctant to make available the code
before a journal publication and you would not necessarily need to make
it open source/free software license wise although this would be
advisable as a matter of fairness when extensively using Openstreetmap
data.
Yes, once the paper is accepted, the algorithm is out there in the open
and I am sure any of us will gladly answer questions and help for anyone
wanting to use the algorithm. Getting a set of tiles with new labelling
for anyone to use is also giving back to the community already?
And i won't even get started on the fact that work of a publicly funded
research institution should benefit the public...
This is a serious point to clarify. The idea of public research is as such:
- researchers push the boundaries and develop new algorithms and publish
them
- companies and engineers in public service use the algorithms for their
products*/tasks
- everything gets more efficient, more money is left for other wonderful
stuff
- repeat
*(note who is the one making the most money with the algorithm in such a
scheme)
There are strong interests at stake that make wholesale software
development at Universities a risky endeavour or plainly forbidden. You
might disagree with that, but I hope you can at least acknowledge there
are competing interests here which neither of us can change at the moment.
Thanks so much for your interest in that work, I agree with you that
most tile-based maps should benefit from labelling improvement. And we
hope we pushed the boundaries in what is feasible without any
proprietary software a little bit.
Let's hope the reviewers see it likewise and we can share the work as
soon as possible with everybody. Don't think we don't want to share,
think of us as wanting to share very early as much as possible.
All the best,
Andreas Reimer
Greetings,
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