O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
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O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
 
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O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/openstreetmap-creative-commons-open-database-license.html -- Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 |
Re: O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
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Without wanting to open up a can of worms the new contributors terms for OSM mean that they can change the license in future to anything. This makes importing data very difficult and imports are especially important to Canada and Australia.
Hence CommonMap commonmap.org which is much more geared up to imports and Open Data. Cheerio John On 17 June 2011 09:03, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote: O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data |
Re: O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
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John;
Can you explain why it would be more difficult? I just do not always understand the nuances of licenses and it would be good to have some context. Cheers t On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:21 AM, john whelan <[hidden email]> wrote: Without wanting to open up a can of worms the new contributors terms for OSM mean that they can change the license in future to anything. This makes importing data very difficult and imports are especially important to Canada and Australia. -- Tracey P. Lauriault 613-234-2805 |
Re: O'Reilly Radar - Choosing the right license for open data
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Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.
To an end user of the map which license is used doesn't really matter. To others it does. OpenStreetMap (OSM) in Europe has two unstated problems, the first is it has too many mappers and the second is some data imports can be twenty or more years out of date. So one agenda is to make imports much less attractive. Data is entered in roughly four ways. The first is some one carries a GPS device that records where it is every second and then uses the trace to create data. Road names are noted from signs on the road. This is the ideal for OpenStreetMap. Lots of people working together to create something from scratch. Accuracy is roughly 5m if you have a high end GPS device, somewhat less if you use a lesser model. The mapper is free to let OSM do what they like with it. The second is tracing from aerial or satellite photography. This can be good if its high definition or bad. Some roads end up 100 meters or more from where they should be. There are licensing implications here. Third is data imports, in Canada CANVEC is a good reliable source but there are licensing issues. Fourth are walking papers where some one notes that there is a post box on a street corner. The data is derived by reference to the corner rather than entered in absolute terms. Under some circumstances UK's Ordnance Survey considers they retain rights under their license if the data has been derived from their maps even indirectly. So there can be licensing issues here also. How does licensing affect things. Should all data be free, well the UK Post Office put a lot of money into developing post codes and its short of money at the moment. They'll sell you the data but hate to give it away free. Their post code data is licensed. If a retired civil servant does some direct mapping and puts the data into OpenStreetMap CANVEC cannot update their maps from it because of the OSM license. Note its not a quality issue here but a licensing issue. CANVEC is good but some areas are a little out of date and they would like to make some limited use of crowd sourcing. Actually there are examples of other government agencies around the world that have people they trust to submit data to them. If we look at apps4Ottawa what we saw was data being used from different sources. If the licenses from different sources are aligned then we can make more useful applications and use of Open Data. It doesn't really matter if its CC-by-odbl or CC-by-SA or CC-by-ABC, what's important is every one understands the license and accepts it. Getting Open Data out of municipalities and government agencies is not always easy, it takes time to get agreements. Many have released their data under CC-by-SA and going back to them and saying oh but we'd like it under a totally different license is costly for everyone. Transportation applications work best when you know where all the bus stops are. Unfortunately OSM isn't very good at this without imported data. The current OSM contributor's terms includes the words "or such other free and open licence" which essentially means I cannot import any data that has a license attached since I don't have the right to agree to any license change in the future. It also means its very difficult to a government agency to agree to OSM using their data unless they make it completely public domain. What is the impact of imports on OSM? Well as part of the apps4Ottawa contest I went over the OSM map for Ottawa checking for street names in order to add the French name in. When I reached a hundred streets with the wrong name I didn't think it was reliable enough. We had a meeting of mappers and agreed to replace the existing road network from CANVEC. As a result the quality of the map in Ottawa was much improved although I have had some less than positive comments about deleting other people's work and replacing it with CANVEC data. To parts of OSM its the act of people coming together to create a map that is important, to others its getting a decent map and they are different objectives. The resulting map is here by the way. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WkJzx5NffRv0TIQgCFFGTQzyqbQ9XDphSLqcjuM8wGM/edit?hl=en_US In Australia, Canada, and the US, reasonable data from different levels of government is available, and since there are many fewer mappers on the ground importing data makes more sense and that's where CommonMap has its roots. It use the OSM tool set but data imports and exchange are the major driving forces. So not so much about the details of licensing but more about the implications. Cheerio John On 17 June 2011 09:25, Tracey P. Lauriault <[hidden email]> wrote: John; |
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