Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Mr. Stace D Maples]

Thanks, Alex.

Clarity is exactly what is needed. Ambiguity = IRB Death. I'm going to be going 
through the OSM Licensing/Copyright Guidelines more closely over the next week 
and will comment outside this thread, if I have comments.

For the record, I hardly think solving things like diarrhoeal disease (2nd 
leading cause of death in children, globally) and tracking human rights abuses 
in repressive regimes are a 1% problems.

In F,L,
Stace Maples
Geospatial Manager
Stanford Geospatial Center
@mapninja
staceymaples@G+
Skype: stacey.maples
214.641.0920
Find GeoData: https://earthworks.stanford.edu
Get GeoHelp: https://gis.stanford.edu/

"I have a map of the United States... actual size.
It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
I spent last summer folding it."
-Steven Wright-

From: Alex Barth >
Reply-To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." 
>
Date: Monday, October 12, 2015 at 12:32 PM
To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." 
>
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline


On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Steve Coast 
> wrote:

On Oct 9, 2015, at 3:22 PM, Alex Barth 
> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Steve Coast 
> wrote:
If you want all these rights, you can just pick up the phone and pay HERE or 
TomTom for them, they'd love to hear from you.

What's more interesting than sending people to HERE and TomTom is making them 
contributors to OpenStreetMap, no?

Absolutely, but at what cost?

OSM solved 95% or 99% of our problems. Should we fundamentally change OSM to 
claim the last 1% so someone can make slightly more money or complete an 
academic project? I don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'm super happy 
with the 99% we achieved already.

I'm very happy about what we have achieved too. I don't think we're solving 95% 
of our problems with OSM though.

"our problems" would of course need more definition and I'm running the risk 
here of misinterpreting what you said. I'm thinking about all the cases where 
OSM isn't used yet, all the mapping that isn't happing in OSM yet. OSM has the 
potential to fundamentally change how we capture and share knowledge about the 
world but we aren't anywhere near the full impact we should be having. 300,000 
active mappers is impressive but the world is much bigger. At a time where the 
internet that was supposed to be Open is turning more and more into a closed 
game of big players and growth for OSM is linear - what's our plan? Fixing the 
license surely can't be the extent of our plan, but we need to be able to have 
a frank conversation about how licensing is hurting use cases and engagement on 
OSM, without second guessing people's intentions and without just showing them 
the door to TomTom and HERE. In that context I find comparing ODbL to Public 
Domain absolutely useful.

I think Stace's comments give a great glimpse into licensing pain points in the 
academic community in the US and the guideline Simon pulled together is going 
to fix some of the issues he's brought up. Having clarity how data linked to 
OSM does not extend the ODbL's share alike to that data should go a long way to 
address some of the concerns he raised.

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Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Mr. Stace D Maples]

Steve

No, not addresses (though that would be nice, too, though. Wasn’t Foursquare 
trying to help with that?), but geocoding to administrative boundaries,as well 
as POI. We were interested in building a system that could be elastic enough to 
geocode to esoteric localities, such as “1 km north of Kendua, Bangladesh” or 
“Madan Pharmacy, Madan, BG” and provide options for retrieving a point, point 
with an uncertainty radius, or an actual json admin boundary, moved north 1 km. 
This would be something similar to Tulane’s Geolocate, but with access to the 
ever growing corpus of POI and features in OSM. Originally, we wanted to build 
something that could be used in a variety of use cases for augmenting medical 
data with location data based upon OSM extracts.

I’m aware of the PD sources for data, however, for instance, there does not 
currently exist a PD source for the locations of all villages (96,817) in 
Bangladesh (we’ve been provided a table of the village names and their unions, 
upazila, etc… by the BG Health Ministry, but without geometries of any type). 
There is, however, the potential for OSM to have most of these villages, 
especially given the efforts of World Bank, HOT… in supporting mapping in 
developing countries, in the future. We’d wanted to be able to identify 
villages from OSM for our data dashboards, but couldn’t determine whether 
mixing the OSM data with personal health information for cholera patients would 
cause an issue and so didn’t.

On the Damascus project, we were interested in doing network analysis on 
reports from informants on the ground about grey-outs of communication and 
power infrastructure, followed by military sweeps of neighborhoods, using OSM 
for street data and the neighborhood boundaries.

Neither of the projects was scrapped because we couldn’t use OSM for the 
project, but because we couldn’t determine IF WE COULD use OSM for our 
particular uses.

Additional question… Is it like the “Elephant in the room” that the 
humanitarian relief space disregards ODbL sharealike? How does OSM feel about 
the difference between potential users who want to operate within the 
parameters of the licensing and those who ignore it (arguably for noble cause, 
in both cases)? I’ve asked people in that space about how ODbL effects/hinders 
their efforts and the answers were the equivalent of shrugs and sly smiles. 
Unfortunately, our IRB seems a bit more skittish than that.

In F,L,
Stace Maples
Geospatial Manager
Stanford Geospatial Center
@mapninja
staceymaples@G+
Skype: stacey.maples
214.641.0920
Find GeoData: https://earthworks.stanford.edu<https://earthworks.stanford.edu/>
Get GeoHelp: https://gis.stanford.edu/

"I have a map of the United States... actual size.
It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
I spent last summer folding it."
-Steven Wright-

From: Steve Coast <st...@asklater.com<mailto:st...@asklater.com>>
Reply-To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." 
<legal-talk@openstreetmap.org<mailto:legal-talk@openstreetmap.org>>
Date: Monday, October 12, 2015 at 1:19 PM
To: "Licensing and other legal discussions." 
<legal-talk@openstreetmap.org<mailto:legal-talk@openstreetmap.org>>
Subject: Re: [OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

Stace

Regarding your first email on this topic you said -

"to built a geocoding platform on Open Source software and Public Domain data 
that could be used to geocode research data”

Could you give an example of what the geocodable string would look like (just 
make one up)? Is it like “1 Alpha Street, Fooville” or is it more like 
“Smallville, AK” ?

If it’s address data - are you aware that OSM doesn’t actually contain much at 
all and thus can’t help you?

If it’s not address data - are you aware that there are multiple PD sources for 
non-address level geocoding?

Because either way I’m having trouble understanding why OSM is in the way to 
achieving what you’re trying to do?

Best

Steve

On Oct 12, 2015, at 2:08 PM, Mr. Stace D Maples 
<stacemap...@stanford.edu<mailto:stacemap...@stanford.edu>> wrote:

Thanks, Alex.

Clarity is exactly what is needed. Ambiguity = IRB Death. I’m going to be going 
through the OSM Licensing/Copyright Guidelines more closely over the next week 
and will comment outside this thread, if I have comments.

For the record, I hardly think solving things like diarrhoeal disease (2nd 
leading cause of death in children, globally) and tracking human rights abuses 
in repressive regimes are a 1% problems.

In F,L,
Stace Maples
Geospatial Manager
Stanford Geospatial Center
@mapninja
staceymaples@G+
Skype: stacey.maples
214.641.0920
Find GeoData: https://earthworks.stanford.edu<https://earthworks.stanford.edu/>
Get GeoHelp: https://gis.stanford.edu/

"I have a map of the United States... actual size.
It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
I spent last summer folding it."

[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Mr. Stace D Maples]

Hello all, I’m new to this list, but wanted to chime in that I am happy to see 
this thread of discussion, here. I’ve been supporting research and teaching 
with geospatial tools for about 15 years (first, at Yale, now at Stanford) and 
I’d like to chime in from that perspective, since the industry angle is well 
represented in the discussion over the last few years.

The ODbL ShareAlike issue first came to my attention at the DC SotM a couple of 
years ago, which I was attending in support of a proposal I had put forth at 
Yale Medical Library to built a geocoding platform on Open Source software and 
Public Domain data that could be used to geocode research data that contains 
personal health information and is therefore subject to the restriction in 
handling and use imposed by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and 
Accountability Act . That, I think, was the meeting where the sharealike issue 
really came to a head, and I went home convinced that I would not be successful 
in getting the licensing terms for OSM past an Internal Review Board, who would 
squash ANY development of a project that could introduce conflicts with HIPAA 
restriction on personal health information. Ironic, in fact, that the very 
answer I had come up with to solve the problem of using non-transparent, 
proprietary software and data, invoked even more serious conflicts with the law 
that was the impetus for the project, in the first place.

Now, two years on, I have seen the lack of clarity in the ODbL and the OSM 
guidance on the subject create a chilling effect on the use of OSM data for 
academic research, particularly in the fields of public health and medicine. In 
several instances, researchers who could have benefitted greatly from the use 
of OSM and who could have done great good in the world with it, have declined 
to use it because of the lack of clarity (in the part of ODbL and OSM) in 
defining just what constitutes a derivative database.

In two instances now, one the above cited project, and another project to 
create a mobile application to help doctors in remote areas of Bangladesh track 
and treat cholera outbreaks, I have seen OSM cause IRB problems and eventually 
seen it stripped from the projects. Additionally, I have seen other researchers 
decline to use OSM data due to privacy issues (in the case of a researcher who 
was hesitant to use OSM to geocode data received from confidential informants 
in Damascus, for obvious reasons), as well as the more benign (but no less 
problematic, in academia) issue of publishing embargoes on research. 
Researchers at higher ed institutions are required to publish. Publishing is a 
competitive game, and many researchers are hesitant to invest their time in 
using research data that may or may not require them to share their own 
research out before they have had a chance to publish.

I am of the opinion that the use of the ShareAlike license does little to 
protect OSM from use by people and organizations that are not willing to 
contribute back to OSM, which I suspect is the idea. What I DO see it doing is 
causing a chilling effect on the use of the data for legitimate research 
purposes, which I can’t imagine that the vast majority of OSM contributors 
would be opposed to. So, ideally, OpenStreetMap should actually be open for any 
use, but barring the dropping of sharealike, there certainly needs to be a 
great deal of clarification and specificity in how the clause is applied. 
Certainly, clearly defined examples of use cases and the parameters of the 
application of sharealike, would be helpful. For instance, if research using 
OSM is subject to sharealike, when must the data be released? Immediately, 
eventually, after a 3 year publishing embargo (that’s our default publishing 
embargo on the Stanford Digital Repository for research data)? How do you 
resolve a conflict between HIPAA and ODbL, when personal health information 
CANNOT be released, under any circumstances? Is research using OSM data in 
Public Health and Medicine simply off limits?

Again, I’m happy to see an active discussion of these issues beginning, here, 
and welcome any questions the list members might have about OSM/ODbL license 
implications outside of commercial applications.

One other question, and I’m just curious, not trying to start a flame war. 
Isn’t some of the data in OSM from public domain datasets? If so, what is the 
OSM rationale for placing a more restrictive licensing model on that data?

Best to all, hope to hear from you soon.

In F,L,
Stace Maples
Geospatial Manager
Stanford Geospatial Center
@mapninja
staceymaples@G+
Skype: stacey.maples
214.641.0920
Find GeoData: https://earthworks.stanford.edu
Get GeoHelp: https://gis.stanford.edu/

"I have a map of the United States... actual size.
It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
I spent last summer folding it."
-Steven Wright-

[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline
Michael Steffen 

[OSM-legal-talk] Any thoughts on the Friday WAPO article referencing OSM RE: India Mapping?

[Mr. Stace D Maples]

Anyone else noticed this? Pretty hefty fine, and the article specifically 
references the OSM depiction of disputed boundaries as problematic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/06/cartographers-beware-india-warns-of-15-million-fine-for-maps-it-doesnt-like/

In F,L,
Stace Maples
Geospatial Manager
Stanford Geospatial Center
@mapninja
G+, Skype, Hangout: stacey.maples
214.641.0920
Find GeoData: https://earthworks.stanford.edu
Get GeoHelp: https://gis.stanford.edu/
stanfordgis Listserv: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/stanfordgis

"I have a map of the United States... actual size.
It says, "Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile."
I spent last summer folding it."
-Steven Wright-
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