On 8/1/14 8:50 AM, Hanno Schlichting wrote:
Hi.
Last week I’ve reached out to the OpenCellId project to talk about
concrete ways to collaborate. Both of our projects have very similar
goals and we found a good deal of overlap in what and how we are
doing things.
This is good news.
...snip...
For exchanging data we unfortunately run into a bit of a license
problem, as the OpenCellId data is available under a CC-BY-SA/Odbl
license, while we are using a public domain (CC-0) license.
The license issue is not so much of a problem from the end user point of
view. My stumbling app currently offers users the ability to upload the
data to either service so that *contribution* is under user control. The
user can then decide if they like the license terms.
A more critical difference, from the user standpoint, is the requirement
by OpenCellID for all observation sets to be uploaded with a user
identifier. This is a significant difference in privacy expectations. It
is possible, though against the grain of the OpenCellID design and a
pain for the developer since the API is poorly defined, to request a new
OpenCellID frequently (even using a bogus email), thereby obscuring the
user's actually identity. Since MozLocServ seems to be moving to
requiring upload keys as well (though at the app level, not the user
level), you are clearly also considering some kind of upload tagging.
The two services should haromonize their thinking about these
identifiers: what they are intended to provide the service and how
strictly necessary they are. In particular, both services should give
serious consideration to allowing anonymous uploads (of which, at the
service end, you can filter more rigourously to evaluate the data
quality if that is your concern). For now, stumbling apps probably ought
to make that difference clear something, in my rush to develop a
functional prototype, I have not yet integrated into my app.
...snip...
In order to make the process easier, we are currently aiming to agree
on a common data format for the aggregated cell data.
More good news.
Note that currently the OpenCellID format, since it is a CSV file, ends
up much more compact than the MozLocServ format. (Yes, it is also
smaller since we don't send it any wifi info.) Compression might mute
this issue, but I have not yet successfully figured out how to generate
the correct compression format for MozLocServ from a FirefoxOS web app.
The more compact format and smaller size, I suspect, is partly
responsible for the uploads to OpenCellID being more reliable than the
uploads to MozLocServ.
cheers,
~adrian
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