Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
Hi, I fully agree that imports should be done very selective to avoid a giant data rubbish dump. However, currently it is very difficult for a user to decide if the data is so important [..] for the foundation [..] that we'd rather have and outdated version of it in OSM than nothing at all. I think it would be good to establish some principles that give guidance to the user if the data are of interest for the community e.g. (a) the location should be of public interest either by being publicly accessible or by being of historic relevance, (b) individuals should not be added to the data base Another helpful feature could be an expiry date. Each import can not be valid longer than e.g. 12 months. After this period the dataset needs update and receives a new validity data. Otherwise the data will become inactive. Regards, Oliver -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Re-OSM-legal-talk-Are-we-strict-enough-with-imports-tp4554380p4560488.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
slightly off topic, one problem we have is many imports are incomplete because of network/server interrupting the upload. Users stopping uploads but not being able to revert them. As a rule please report broken imports/uploads and someone can revert them before manual changes make it nearly impossible. the problem with guidance is, many will not read it. how many active mappers/importers contribute to osm. how many subscribe to talk, read the wiki AND follow the advice? And the wiki doesn't contain much guidance. Anyone up to improve the wiki? Can add more info collected from earlier emails in talk but someone should review if it all makes sense. On 12 Feb 2010, at 3:01 , Oliver Kuehn (skobbler) wrote: Hi, I fully agree that imports should be done very selective to avoid a giant data rubbish dump. However, currently it is very difficult for a user to decide if the data is so important [..] for the foundation [..] that we'd rather have and outdated version of it in OSM than nothing at all. I think it would be good to establish some principles that give guidance to the user if the data are of interest for the community e.g. (a) the location should be of public interest either by being publicly accessible or by being of historic relevance, (b) individuals should not be added to the data base Another helpful feature could be an expiry date. Each import can not be valid longer than e.g. 12 months. After this period the dataset needs update and receives a new validity data. Otherwise the data will become inactive. Regards, Oliver -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Re-OSM-legal-talk-Are-we-strict-enough-with-imports-tp4554380p4560488.html Sent from the General Discussion mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
On 12.02.2010 12:01, Oliver Kuehn (skobbler) wrote: Hi, Another helpful feature could be an expiry date. Each import can not be valid longer than e.g. 12 months. After this period the dataset needs update and receives a new validity data. Otherwise the data will become inactive. Regards, Oliver It would be nice to be able to tell if imports are used or not. Sadly this is not the case. If we removed untouched objects from the Austrian plan.at import, then we would surely break even more, because people connected other streets to the imported data, without correcting the imports In general I think data that is easily recordable/traceable shouldn't be imported. So streets and their like should have very low priority. In the US I think the Tiger Import is at least partly responsible for the low interest (it's more fun to enter something new, than to correct old stuff). Austria had before the imports actually a on par or better coverage than Germany. Then with plan.at imports virtually 80% of all roads were inside OSM - but with very low quality. 15 month later Austria really lacks in quantity and quality compared to Germany, and still IMHO around 30-40% of the Imports are more or less incorrect. I think it will take another year or two to recover the damage and get down to 3-5% uncorrected import data. If however we had high-resolution orthophotos cleaning up the import would be largely over and only very few bits and pieces would be left over and the import probably by now considered as a success. On the other hand data that is very hard to source, like maybe exact postal codes, drains, small rivers, detailed data about landuse (as imported in France and Latvia) that without - or even with - good resolution orthophotos cannot be mapped, lower quality could be accepted because we stand a hard chance of ever getting it otherwise. I think the rule, if it is easily mapable (no matter the effort and probability of it being done), then we should be a lot stricter and make sure that the quality of the import is at least as good as good mapping practice allows (Tiger Data is IMHO not good enough quality for example). If however it is not easily mapable then imports can be introduced. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
On Fri, 12 Feb 2010, Oliver Kuehn (skobbler) wrote: Another helpful feature could be an expiry date. Each import can not be valid longer than e.g. 12 months. After this period the dataset needs update and receives a new validity data. Otherwise the data will become inactive. natural features don't go out of date that fast. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
Hi, (I'm hijacking this thread which Nic started about legalities of imports on legal-talk, and moving over to talk) Nic Roets wrote: My suggestion is that we should have a fixed, but simple procedure for users who import data: I think that every import should start with a deliberation on whether to import *at all*. Currently, I have the impression that many people are very trigger-happy when it comes to importing data. I believe that is running the risk of making OSM into one giant data rubbish dump. The old-style GIS community is currently working on several projects that collect what they call metadata - basically, because they know that there are so many different people with so many different data sets, they are working on ways to describe these datasets in a way that hopefully enables intelligent clients to present data retrieved from all of them as one coherent data set. This is of course extremely difficult and introduces many problems that one does not have when using just one huge database instead of thousands of different databases. But since many datasets are not static, you cannot simply grab them and pour them into one large database and be happy. What does this mean for our data imports? Data that is externally owned and maintained should not be imported, with the following exceptions: * if the data is so important for us (usu. as the foundation for other crowdsourced stuff) that we'd rather have and outdated version of it in OSM than nothing at all; * if we are confident that we, the OSM community, will do a better, more reliable, more thorough, and more timely job in updating the information than the original owner (this includes cases where the original owner has ceased maintenance); * if he are confident that we can easily synchronize our database with any updates made by the original owner to his data set. In all other cases it would be *much* more desirable to establish better mechanisms of merging OSM data with that other data in preparation for map drawing etc., rather than pulling it all in and having it rot. I would very much like to develop a kind of litmus test for imports, and get the message across that not every import is a good import (even if legally spotless). Today, even newcomers to OSM sometimes seem hell-bent on importing large quantities of data just because they can. I would like to remind people that OSM has a very lively culture of surveying data - and I'd rather have 1 sq km surveyed by a newbie than 100 sq km imported. Bye Frederik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
Emilie Laffray a écrit : On 11 February 2010 12:24, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org mailto:frede...@remote.org wrote: [...] Ok, but please do not forget that in crisis situations (e.g. Haiti), there could be people dying while the deliberation would be taking place... Jean-Guilhem ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Frederik Ramm frede...@remote.org wrote: (I'm hijacking this thread which Nic started about legalities of imports on legal-talk, and moving over to talk) But before you do that, please tell me if you concur on the legal issue... * if we are confident that we, the OSM community, will do a better, more reliable, more thorough, and more timely job in updating the information than the original owner (this includes cases where the original owner has ceased maintenance); There was a time when I agreed with that. Especially for large imports of data with little navigational use, because it makes manipulating the data more difficult. But if we don't import, people will either anticipate the import and not edit, or they'll add stuff that will conflict with the downstream merge. If we do import, people see all the nice things (like the buildings in Holland) and it raises awareness of OSM. When the upstream source releases an update, we'll deal with it. For example, we can take a statistical sample and decide if the edits added more value than the upstream source. Or we can decide to keep the old import. Either way we are moving forward in small steps. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
Hi, Jean-Guilhem Cailton wrote: Ok, but please do not forget that in crisis situations (e.g. Haiti), there could be people dying while the deliberation would be taking place... This is something to be discussed later, I guess, but my take is that we should separate crisis stuff from the rest of OSM, to the point of having separate databases. We'd still use the normal OSM tools but there would be a special API server for a crisis region. There, people could do whatever they please (even more so than in normal OSM) without interference from others. After the crisis has subsided, temporary structures removed and so on, work could then start on moving selected items from the crisis map over into the normal OSM map. If this is not done, I sense a potential for conflicts of all kind. As apparent in the dramatic wording you chose above (there could be people dying...), a humanitarian crisis anywhere could put strain on the project as a whole: What, you want to take the database offline for a weekend to perform the move to API 0.8 that you have planned for half a year? But there could be people dying! - What, the database didn't work for a whole night and the admin was in the pub? But there could have been people dying! - What, you want to do a world-wide day of post box mapping? But this is going to slow down the API and there could be people dying!, and so on. Being able to provide value in humanitarian crises is a side-effect of a healthy OSM - not a core purpose of OSM. Bye Frederik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [OSM-legal-talk] Are we strict enough with imports ?
In your letter dated Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:24:12 +0100 you wrote: In all other cases it would be *much* more desirable to establish better mechanisms of merging OSM data with that other data in preparation for map drawing etc., rather than pulling it all in and having it rot. I would very much like to develop a kind of litmus test for imports, and get the message across that not every import is a good import (even if legally spotless). Today, even newcomers to OSM sometimes seem hell-bent on importing large quantities of data just because they can. I would like to remind people that OSM has a very lively culture of surveying data - and I'd rather have 1 sq km surveyed by a newbie than 100 sq km imported. I think the 'spirit of OSM' is the other way around: if importing a dataset is harmful to the project then don't do it. Assuming data is properly imported (i.e. a new user created just for that import), then deleting or ignoring that data is always an option. So people who want to link OSM to another database can just do that. Of course, you can't import data is it isn't legal to do so. If an import makes life a lot harder for other mappers in the area, then a good discussion is required about the merits of the import. But otherwise, finding an outdated import in OSM may even create awareness that a certain dataset exists and is freely available. For example I don't particularly like the import of the Dutch GSM antenna locations (mostly because the josm verifier falls over the duplicate nodes), but it is fun to see them on the map, and I never thought that that info would be freely available. ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
