Re: [OSM-talk] RR8 - Possible International Vandal (assistance required in various countries)
2009/10/4 John Smith : > If it is a genuine concern about being abused for making mistakes the > people abusing people should be dealt with there is no reason for it, I'm not sure if you followed the original incident. This was not a case of an inexperienced mapper making some mistakes while trying to map reality. This is a user who appears to have used the tools in an accomplished way to map a fantasy road network in several different countries, ignoring all contact received from other mappers. And no, I didn't abuse him for it, tempted though I was. Incidentally, even though I'm still smarting from this guy's idiocy, I do think it would be good for us to have a play area allowing people to edit and render what-if maps. Our tools are well-suited to this and it's a community of users who may also be prepared to do real mapping. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back
On 23 February 2010 20:17, SteveC wrote: An excellent and though-provoking post. It's rare to read something of that length on such touchy subjects and agree with so much of the content. If I had to pick a single most important theme as the central one, it's the whole area of turning people away from the project before they even begin and how that's a really bad thing. For a long time OSM was so far away from being ready for mass appeal that it didn't really matter if normal people stayed away. We don't have that luxury any more. Our public face has to show us up at our best against the competition, because the public doesn't know or care how clever it is under the hood. But they do know what they can do with Google Maps and similar, and we need to make those features an obvious and easy part of our own front page, starting with mashable maps for the ordinary user. And yes, I'm prepared to work on it. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back
On 24 February 2010 16:19, David Earl wrote: > I'd like to say a few words on the home page and editor. > > 1. Home Page: while I think Steve's proposal addresses some of the > criticisms of the way the home page functions, I don't think it takes a > holistic view of the project. What someone coming to it will initially > see is essentially a "me too" for Google maps: it offers a service not a > project. This issue is basically our main holy way. And while I can see why you take this view, I disagree with you. It comes back to the issue of users - who they (mostly) are and whether they are like "us". When OSM was mostly a lot of spidery lines and even more empty space, it would probably have been a mistake to have a front door that invited users to see us as a Google Maps wannabe that just happened to have crappy maps. Far better to fess up to the fact that we're trying to build something and that you'd better be prepared to get your hands dirty if you want to be involved. I think, and I know many will disagree, that in a lot of the world we now have a much better story to tell the kind of people that don't want dirty hands. These people measure our offering feature for feature against what they already have from Google. Most of the things they care about aren't that difficult to deliver, we just need to decide as a community that we should be delivering them in the first place. Any web site should optimise its top level for the kinds of people it wants to appeal to. Up until now, we've only catered to people broadly like ourselves that will help us to grow the map _in_the_ways_we've_grown_it_to_date_. And I think we have broad agreement that people of that sort need to have an attention span long enough to linger on the site, read bits of the wiki, register and so on. So the proposition is that we find a way on the home page to funnel the curious geeks into the hardcore area of the site - something quite like what we have now, but even for this target group there is surely plenty we can improve. This I would see in the form of a teaser - "constantly evolving map: you can help!" or similar. But the home page real-estate should otherwise be utterly devoted to user-level features of the sort that non-expert users enjoy elsewhere. User waypoints. User lines and areas. .kml overlays, tracklog imports - we can argue over what these user applications are and which will serve our purpose best, but our goal is first to hook users on our maps and demonstrate that they can be used to solve their actual problems. Because if we don't establish this value, then these users will never feed us their missing street names or mark their local post box or fast food joint. It will seem a shame to us that we're letting people assume that the map _is_ the Mapnik layer or that routing can only be as good as whatever engine we decide to make default. But the fact is that, if we want the world using our map rather than others, way less than 1% of our users will ever render a custom map or crack open a full-features map editor. Our challenge, summarised into two simple points: All those people who, having visited today's site, become contributors: make sure they quickly find the good stuff we already have. The much larger group of people who spend 2 minutes (if that long) trying to work out why they should use OSM rather than Google: show them why. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back
On 24 February 2010 17:19, Tom Hughes wrote: > On 24/02/10 16:58, Dermot McNally wrote: > I completely disagree. We're running a project to map the world, We agree on that - but I claim that to do so effectively we have to harness the power of all those people who don't yet "get" what we're trying to achieve... > not a > project to provide an end user site to compete with google maps. ...whereas they _do_ understand google maps and what it can do for them. They need to get over the misconception that OSM can't do those things, a misconception that is reinforced by our current default slippy map. Furthermore, it's a win-win. We don't have to (indeed, we shouldn't) stop all the good stuff we're doing already. We just need to do some extra things, probably with different people working on them. Voluntary projects are like that, of course - you can't go around telling a highly motivated person to stop the worthy task he cares about and work on one he doesn't. Instead, you find someone else who wants to do it. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back
On 25 February 2010 17:28, Anthony wrote: > Are you sure about that? How many people does it take to map the world? > 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? More than that? > > The more the merrier. But I'm not sure about the whole "we have to" part... > Alright - let's settle on "we should". In a world where we can't define when a map is "complete", "have to" is going to be similarly subjective. But the answer to your second question is "more than that" - whatever the suggested figure is. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] suggestion for SOTM09
2008/7/15 Nick Whitelegg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Yes, and somewhere with good walking / nice scenery (=mapping party?) > would be good. Black Forest or Alps maybe? Or southern France or a > mountainous area of Spain or Italy? Austria sounds like a possibility here - it could also do with some extra mappers descending on it for a weekend. Or Munich, which also has mountains close by. Thanks, BTW, to those SOTM delegates who did some excellent mapping while in Ireland. And for those who logged but haven't yet uploaded, I'd be delighted to have some more raw material. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] tagging peat bogs in ireland
2008/7/15 Tim Waters (chippy) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hi, > > as some of us have been out mapping the Irish countryside, we've come > across peat bogs. Lowland peat bogs mainly, often being used for turf > extraction (for fuel, or peat for garden centres etc). > > Anyone mapped these already? What tags do you use? It's certainly > natural, sometimes protected, and sometimes used commercially. To expand on this - because it's something I've wondered about myself - when tagging as seen on-the-ground, there's a big difference between a bog being used commercially and a normal, untouched bog. The commercially-worked ones have had the vegetation layer stripped off to expose vast areas of chocolate-brown peat, easily recognised from satellite images. Untouched ones are marshy and have heather growing on them, but are otherwise of fairly normal appearance. Is there precedent from open-cast mines that might show us how to tag "open" bogs? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] tagging peat bogs in ireland
2008/7/15 Tim Waters (chippy) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > There is this: > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/Surface_Mining > > But I don't think it covers the "bog" as a whole. Perhaps a big > polygon natural=lowland_bog and within that, areas of > landuse=surface_mining with resource=peat ? That looks perfect. In practice, you'll probably find it difficult to map a bog as a whole, rather it's the big empty brown bit that you'll generally end up mapping. > I think peat is the same as turf, used in domestic fires? It certainly is. In traditional use, cuboid sections of peat/turf would be extracted from the bog and left in the open air to dry. These were of a shape and size useful for a domestic fire. On the mass-market these days you generally get peat briquettes, which are made of milled peat, extracted mechanically from the exposed surface of the bog. This is then compressed into briquettes. Ireland created a nationalised industry to exploit the bogs shortly after independence. In a state striving for independence, turf filled the gap caused by the fact that we had essentially no native coal. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] suggestion for SOTM09
2008/7/15 Iván Sánchez Ortega <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'll start working on my 12 MB worth of traces... That "Saint Stephen's Green" > in Dublin needs some work. It sure does. The paths in there as mapped date back to the first mapping party and were sampled from IIRC an armband-mounted SIRFIII logger, possibly not even on a great sample interval. It will be nice to have them fixed. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Josm: bug in Simplify Way?
2008/7/16 Gabriel Ebner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Oops. This is pretty embarrassing, but it seems I forgot to convert degrees > to radians before calculating the cross track error... As long as we're on the subject... I tend to find that I can't simplify ways at all, unless I first split them. Generally, I'll select the second node in the way, split on it and _then_ the simplify way function will happily let me simplify the remaining way. Is this expected? Are others seeing it? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Isle of Man coastline issue
2008/8/7 Dan Karran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Does anyone have any ideas about what might be causing this tile to > render as an all-land tile? I had tried in the past few days to render > this as a mixed tile (through the informationfreeway.org interface but > it didn't seem to have helped... and I've just tried again now to make > sure). I don't think this is just you - the same thing is happening in the west of Ireland on the coastline near Galway city: http://www.informationfreeway.org/?lat=53.265876612906546&lon=-9.08438064587&zoom=12&layers=B000F000F I can't see anything wrong here either. Could it be a regression in the [EMAIL PROTECTED] client? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Isle of Man coastline issue
2008/8/7 Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > There was a bug in close-areas.pl which I have just commited a fix for, the > Galway coastline looks ok now (not uplaoded new tiles but checked locally), > maybe anyone else seeing a coastline problem and who has [EMAIL PROTECTED] > installed could > check whether it's ok now but I believe it should. Nice work - I'm sorry now that I didn't suggest this cause a week ago, but I wasn't convinced that the coastline was still correct... -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Calling all Londoners - the Thames...
Folks, The Thames these days is looking OK on both main renderers, but not on Computerteddy's Garmin maps, which he creates with mkgmap. On the Garmin maps it overflows its banks all over the place - the London Eye, for instance, is underwater. Looking at this myself, I'm not that surprised - there's an unusual variety of tagging going on, mostly involving riverbank ways also tagged as coastline, but not actually forming closed shapes as the current wiki page indicates they should. One pair of opposite banks are even members of a multipolygon relation in a way that was certainly never intended. My approach in fixing this would be to remove the coastline tag and close the riverbank sections, but I don't want to step on any toes. Is anybody working on this? Does anybody want to defend the status quo? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Me and Ed Parsons are drowning!
2008/8/20 Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > The Thames River has flooded... > http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.4084&lon=-0.3652&zoom=12&layers=0B0FTF > > Has someone done something that will be fixed when it rerenders? Or could > someone please have a look at it. > I don't know much about how riverbanks and the likes are supposed to be > done. I can explain some of the background to this - and I'll copy in Carsten, since I think he did some recent work on this. Basically, the long-standing (odd) tagging was working for Mapnik and Osmarender in a classic "tagged-for-the-renderer" kind of way. But when Garmin maps were produced with mkgmap, the Thames flooded. My post a few days ago was on the foot of a thread on the German list, looking to see if there was a reason it shouldn't be retagged with a view to adopting standard tagging and thus enabling it to work in all three cases (and, we'd hope, others). >From what I can see of work I did on the river Shannon, Mapnik does, in fact, kind of support riverbank, in that it renders a blue outline, but doesn't fill it with water. That's nothing that should cause a flood, though. Furthermore, a "nicer" flawed tagging scheme that will allow the fill is to add an additional natural=water tag to the closed riverbank way. IMHO, we shouldn't do this, as an ugly Thames is a good catalyst to provoke Mapnik support. It would in any case be a shame to reintroduce the coastline this far inland. Carsten, do you have any theories about the likely cause? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Mapnik handling of highways that are also landuse...
Folks - with reference to this: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.72339&lon=-6.34273&zoom=17&layers=B00FTF ...which is a section of the Mapnik render of the outcome of the very successful Drogheda Mapping Party in Ireland. Towards the centre of the map, you'll see what is represented as an oval area of residential highway. I can almost see why, but it struck me that it represents unwanted behaviour that could possibly be fixed. What we have here is a closed way of type highway=residential. Importantly, it isn't tagged as an area. It _is_ tagged (the same way) as landuse=grass. So without understanding the internals of Mapnik, it's as though the landuse, which applies at area-level, infects the highway tag and causes it to be considered as an area too. Clearly, I could simply draw a second way through the same nodes, and there are plenty of heated discussions over which approach is the saner. But it feels as though this tag combination ought to be able to render correctly as is. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Mapnik handling of highways that are also landuse...
2008/8/28 Steve Chilton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > There are two reasons why your "tag combination ought to be able to > render correctly as is" statement is not valid. This is always a risk :) > Firstly - as Thomas pointed out - mapnik likes one feature per way. > Secondly - landuse=grass is not rendered at the moment (because of the > vast disagreement on the whole landuse/natural/grass thing). A further complexity, certainly. The amusing thing is, I only started using landuse=grass very recently, after deciding that recreation_ground was probably not a good tag for what we're describing here. > What I am guessing you have on the ground is a residential square with a > road round the outside and a grassy bit in the middle. Correct. > There is no way I > know of for mapnik to interpret this correctly from a double-tagged > single way like this. It would have to be able to draw a line, a road > fill, a second line, and then the grass fill. > Where these occur in areas I have seen (many grass filled squares in C > London) two parallel ways have been used - and yes I know that people > are using leisure=park "incorrectly" in order to get them rendered, but > probably excusable in London as they are often formal park/recreation > areas. Well, a technical limitation is just that - if it can't be done, we need to live with it. The end result is certainly unintuitive, though, since the only area tag named (the landuse) isn't the style that gets applied to the area. I feel the workaround coming on... Thanks, Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Mapnik handling of highways that are also landuse...
2008/8/28 robin paulson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > this sounds a lot like you're using the same way to form the centre of > the road, and the boundary of the grass. wouldn't it be easier to use a > separate way to represent each? That is what I'm doing. I don't do this in all cases, but some do lend themselves rather well to it. In my sample case, I have a closed way representing a highway. So no, it wouldn't be "easier" to create a brand new way, either reusing the nodes or staying just a little within them. That's extra work. We can discuss whether your approach (which is one I sometimes use) is more correct, but it certainly isn't easier. > i can't imagine the grass extends to the middle of the road Clearly not - but I'd reiterate what Thomas said. Reuse of the way (or creation of an identical one using the same nodes) is IMHO topologically valid given the intended uses of our data. You would only insist on modelling such green areas, say, 3m away from the road centre if you were also in the business of mapping road boundary instead of centre line. Mapping a centre line is an approximation to reality. A simplified notion of abutting areas that assumes them to extend to that centre line is entirely consistent with that approximation. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Correct tagging of church grounds
Hi, This post arises out of the Drogheda mapping party held last weekend. For the party, our base was a parish hall in the grounds of a church, kindly placed at our disposal by the Rector. As thanks, we made sure to collect detailed mapping information for church and grounds. I can't work out the best tagging for the perimeter of the church grounds themselves. These encompass the church itself, the parish hall, a car park, rectory and gardens, all of which can be tagged easily enough in ways that will render. I've provisionally used landuse=churchyard, which doesn't render. Is there any consensus of how this should be tagged? If so, does it render, or might it in the future? Our PR value rises greatly if the people who have been kind to us can see the results of our mapping... Thanks, Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Correct tagging of church grounds
2008/8/29 Gregory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > My only thought would be tag as much as you can (carpark, graveyard, > buildings, paths, are all quite big) which will give an idea of what's the > space been used as. Agreed. I've already done this, and meant to include a link: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.716673&lon=-6.349931&zoom=18&layers=B00FTF > Perhaps the remaining space could be tagged as some green landuse(I assume > it has grass & trees), although you want to avoid people going there to play > football. So why not propose something a new tag for it. That too seems reasonable, and it's what I'll do if it emerges that no suitable precedent exists. Thanks, Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Correct tagging of church grounds
2008/8/29 robin paulson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > or why not 'amenity=place_of_worship' defined on the entire area, with > smaller areas of building, car park, etc? that's what it's for, after all That's not actually clear, though with consensus, it could become accepted as the best approach. It's certainly clear that it's valid to position a node at the location of a church building and tag it amenity=place_of_worship, because a church is such a place. Likewise (and this is what I did in this instance), you could map the outline of the church and tag the outline in the same way. It's still referring to the church, only in greater detail. I don't see that the perimeter of the entire church complex is a place of worship. To return to Old Trafford for a minute, it is a stadium in the centre of which there is a pitch. You wouldn't tag the entire complex as a pitch any more than you should tag a whole church grounds as a place of worship. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] RFC: render explicitly used "oneway=no"
2008/9/1 Stanislav Brabec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > oneway=no is the default in most cases, so it is rarely needed tag. > > But once it is mentioned explicitly, it should be rendered somehow, as > the mapper probably wants to emphasize this fact. I sometimes tag in this way. The only case I can think of where I do it is that of motorway_link (or trunk_link, *_link), and in these cases, I think that a human map reader would usually infer the truth without requiring visual clues. My reasoning for the explicit tag in these cases is that some routing engines might consider that a link (which is usually a ramp) is usually one way, the same way roundabouts are supposed to be treated. So for my use, I don't see the need. But maybe there are other cases. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenRouteService now supports UK and Ireland
2008/9/2 Pascal Neis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > all services of openrouteservice.org > now also available for UK and Ireland. Go raibh míle maith agaibh! (= vielen herzlichen Dank!) Some of the routing decisions between secondary and higher road categories are interesting, but in Ireland at least, it seems to be making good routing decisions. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenRouteService now supports UK and Ireland
2008/9/2 Kevin Ryan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > The routing is a bit off for the places that I tried (Shannon to Newmarket > on Fergus, Ireland) I see what you mean - this is a bit like what happens if you plan a route out of Dublin towards Limerick - it takes a shorter route to the Naas Road rather than sticking to the dual carriageway N4 and M50. I wonder whether setting maxspeed on the roads concerned might provide enough hints to fix things. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap routing service
2008/9/7 Lambertus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I think it's fair to assume that a cyclist isn't allowed on that type of > road on mainland Europe anywhere...Anyway, global routing using only a > single definition for max (average actually) speeds and other properties > for roads isn't optimal. I agree with the second half of what you say here, and that's because I disagree with the first bit. I know that German tagging practice has evolved to consider "trunk" to refer to vehicle-only routes, but there's no reason to suppose that other countries will use the same reasoning. The term originates in the UK road classification system, where it's simply the highest category of non-motorway road. Within that category, quality can vary greatly between motorway-standard roads and glorified cart tracks. This same situation applies next door in Ireland. Other countries are as likely to be like UK and Ireland as they are to follow German practice. Basically, it just shows that we can't trust the highway classification to give us any hints other than the following: Vehicles only and high speed: motorway only max practical speed: where maxspeed is provided suitability for vehicles, bikes and pedestrians: where access is provided Interruptions to traffic flow, with the capacity to limit speed: where traffic signals, roundabouts, mini-roundabouts, crossings or non-*-link roads join a road. Other inferences on road class, if you wished to draw them, would need to change from country to country, and that doesn't seem scalable. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap routing service
2008/9/8 Nic Roets <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Next mappers will omit units of measurement > because they feel it it's implied for their country. I omit units because I feel they are implied for the _world_. Map features, unless it has been changed since, takes the view that, for instance, width and maxspeed are understood to be in m and km/h. Subsequent discussion has decided that units should be permitted, and there are many opinions for or against this, but let's be careful in our definitions of normality... Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_link implies oneway=??
2008/10/2 Nic Roets <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Isn't a motorway by definition divided and therefore oneway ? Usually, but not always. Exceptions have existed either at the beginning of a motorway, where the last escape for non-motorway traffic occurs, say 100m before the directions separate. France used to have a few stretches of single-carriageway motorway. Consider that motorway is a legal classification that conveys certain restrictions, and these _can_ occasionally apply on roads that would surprise you. Also, although no longer a motorway, the Carrington Spur in Manchester was an interesting edge case: http://pathetic.org.uk/former/a6144m/ Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Motorways and Motorway_link
2008/10/3 Lester Caine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > My comment about the speed limit was that the 60 applies ( or even less if a > local limit applies on the approaching roads! ) UP TO the start of motorway > sign and some of these link roads that is simply not at the 'start' of the > road. At some point, if correct speed indication is to be provided for route > planning, then the position of the actual start point is as important as > placing a change of speed limit at the correct point? Are we not splitting hairs here? Certainly, the instruction to a learner driver is that the chopsticks sign indicates the start of motorway regulations, including any implied speed limit. Likewise, the standard signing practice is to place these signs at the commencement of any road that leads inescapably to the motorway. Our tagging practice is to reflect this "motorway zone" through use of the motorway or motorway_link tags. So far so good. If I'm reading you right, you're describing situations where the chopsticks sign appears some distance past the point of last escape. That happens from time to time, and is simply a case of the sign being wrongly placed. This is particularly common in Ireland, where there's huge variation in the placement of the sign, including some recent cases where the sign has been practically at the merge point with the mainline. My personal practice is to ignore the implication of badly placed signs and apply a motorway or motorway_link tag from the point of last escape. This provides the most useful view of the on-the-ground facts and should also reflect the underlying legislation for the road. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Motorways and Motorway_link
2008/10/4 Philip Homburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > That strikes me as a bad idea. If you use that kind of tagging with a > device that displays the current speed limit in effect than you get the > very confusing situation that the actual situation differs from the map *by > design*. On the contrary. I map the facts. Occasionally, signage diverges from those facts. > In .nl it is common to place warning signs for cyclists and pedestrians when > a piece of road leads only to a motorway. But if you really want to, you can > walk to the motorway sign. Sure, but in Ireland (and UK) the correct placement of the motorway sign is the point of divergence of the standard road network. So where you have two on-the-ground facts at odds with each other like this, you need to make a judgement, as you do, for instance, when the street name signs at either end of the street differ in spelling. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/5 Ed Loach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 30mph. If we had stayed with assumed country-specific units then the tagging > would have been more consistent, easier for the user to tag, and not require > a conversion to a random number of decimal places. I'm not a fan of the options that include suffixes or other tricks to imply units. That said, even that approach is better than using country-specific units, because it's a huge burden on applications to work out what country a restriction falls within (twofold, since the border data is often imprecise too). Consider the Irish border, which is also an imperial/metric border. Yuck! A further drawback with the approach is the assumption that units stay uniform within a particular country. But in the UK, it's getting common for height restrictions to be stated in dual units. So for transitional cases like that, the country-specific model breaks down. I'm with Shaun on the namespacing thing. Allowing fields like maxspeed to contain normalised, pure numeric data is beneficial for fast data extraction, and the namespaced approach allows for automatic updating of the "real|" numeric field. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??
2008/10/6 Matthias Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > "Stephen Hope" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Bad assumption. This may be the case in parts of Europe and the USA, >> but certainly not in most parts of the world. > > Maybe not in most parts of the worlds, but most trunk roads. ;-) I know that the German mappers have decided that "trunk" is a handy extra road category that can be used for Schnellstraßen. I also know that other countries find it a useful classification for similar purposes. But the country whose road system gave us the "trunk" tag has thousands of km of standard single-carriageway road that bears the tag. I would assume that oneway sections are in the minority in the UK. In Ireland they certainly are. I can't argue with your conclusion, though - I always explicitly tag oneway where it applies. Usually even on roundabouts :P Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??
2008/10/7 Philip Homburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I think local norms are fine. However that requires a lot of localization > work. > > But a global norm is better than a local one. > > Localization is likely to happen anyway when people start displaying speed > limits. Or do you want to tag even the smallest country road with the > appropriate speed limit for all types of vehicles? > > Maybe technical solutions are an option: defining administrative areas that > contain the defaults that apply. This works in theory, but we are some way off it in practice. You either need to tell every segment of road which administrative area it lies within (can be difficult) _or_ to get your boundaries dead right (this is proving very tricky with today's sources). Most end-devices will probably be too stupid to apply such rules on the fly, though pre-processing is certainly an option. > I'm a bit worried about routing software sending people the wrong way up > a dual-carriage way. I very much prefer to default to a safe state. And that > means either requiring explicit yes/no oneway tags for both motorway and > trunk or implying oneway for those roads. Only the explicit tagging is a valid choice, then. I'm certainly not retagging the bulk of my national road network to oneway=no just because of shifts in local interpretations of what a trunk road is. And it still doesn't solve the problem of dual-carriageway primary, secondary or tertiary roads, of which there are plenty. >>those that are members of a dual_carriageway relation > > I think this is risky: if one way or another the dual_carriageway relation > is not there, then routing software will default to an unsafe configuration. I think you're misunderstanding me here - nothing will protect us from broken tagging. But I'm saying that the mapper should have a choice. Either explicitly tag your carriageways as oneway or, if you value tidiness, provide a relation. It's my counter-offer to those who say "all trunks in my country are dual, therefore I want to reduce clutter by implying oneway". I'm saying "No, if you want to reduce clutter, do so by using the relation. This way, we solve the problem of clutter for all road types, but we don't invalidate existing trunks.". Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??
2008/10/7 Ed Loach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > This is a roundabout where you can go either way around the "big" > roundabout, and at each junction with a road there is a > mini-roundabout. When these sort of roundabouts, often nicknamed > "Magic Roundabouts" > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead) > cropped up on this other email list I wondered how they were tagged > in OSM, because of the implied oneway of junction=roundabout. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.562812&lon=-1.77143&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF This is the original Magic Roundabout in Swindon. Here, some licence has been taken with the ways, as you'll see that the "two-way" nature of the flow is implemented here as separate one-way ways. On some sections, this is accurate, as there are real traffic islands. In others, there is just hatching, but since you may not cross it, it's not the biggest tagging sin imaginable. Strictly speaking, the mini-roundabouts should be tagged as such, but I can imagine that would be difficult to do nicely given the dual ways that would converge at each one. Road geeks would contend that Magic Roundabouts are not really roundabouts (apart from the outer minis), but "gyratory traffic systems". The distinction being that they diverge from standard roundabout rules of flow, right-of-way, layout etc., but are still circular. The API seems to be antisocial at the moment, so I can't check the tagging, but my inclination here would be not to tag anything but the 5 outer roundabouts with junction=roundabout. Think of what a routing application might make of it... Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??
2008/10/7 Philip Homburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > For trunk roads, it might be just a safe default to assume that the way is > oneway, unless tagged explicitly as single-carriage (oneway=no). People can keep saying that, but it won't make it true :) For me, there are very few cases where oneway should safely be implied, and I generally tag these explicitly regardless: motorway (almost universally so, but we have the option to set oneway=no where not the case). motorway_link and other *_link (though we know that there are many countries where two-way stretches of these are common) anything with junction=roundabout Trunk roads shouldn't be implied oneway, simply because of the established usage of this tag to represent normal single-carriageway roads. (National primary routes in Ireland, primary A roads in UK, possibly others). My contention is that implicit tagging is only valid where we have a global norm. Local norms aren't enough. Based on this reasoning, if you choose to accept it, it ISTM that only motorway mainlines and roundabouts should be assumed oneway. BTW, there may be an alternative resolution to this matter. The problem here is that we can't agree, country-to-country, which highway tags should generally imply _dual-carriageway_. However, we do have ways of recognising a dual-carriageway from other clues - either the existence of parallel ways with the same ref and different directions or (better) the existence of a dual_carriageway relation. So we can solve this problem right now by deciding that a better list of implied-one-way highway ways is: those with junction=roundabout those that are members of a dual_carriageway relation That will cover any stretches of trunk or motorway (or anything else) that happen to be dualled. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] [Tagging] - RFC - Motorway_linkimpliesoneway=??
2008/10/8 Philip Homburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I don't think this is about local interpretations. It is about having > safe defaults. Agreed 100% > Of course, adding oneway=no to all trunk ways that do not have a oneway tag > can be done by a script. Clearly it could be - but it certainly _shouldn't_ be, unless that script can be confined to an area where it is certain that all trunks really are dual in accordance with local tagging norms. But I prefer this... > Another approach, that may also work for trunk roads is to write a consistency > checker that tries to detect this situation. > > A first pass tries to find roads with the same names, or unnamed roads that > are roughly parallel. Then report any road in that set that doesn't have an > explicit oneway tag. This is a lot safer IMHO, since (arguably) if we have mapped only one carriageway of a dualled road, it's more useful for routing software to be allowed to route both ways over it. With incomplete mapping, insisting on correct setting of oneway isn't all that useful. > I don't think that a relation should be used to imply oneway=yes. It's just > too risky. A dual-carriageway relation should. In a world where not even roundabouts are guaranteed to be one-way, we can at least trust a dual-carriageway to be so. > In a country where just all trunk roads are dual-carriage ways, defaulting > to oneway=no is just too risky. > > But you seem to care more about the burden of retagging some existing trunk > roads than about having safe defaults. Not at all. I don't care about the burden of retagging trunk roads. But I don't want the tail to wag the dog. The trunk tag was conceived for roads that are not inherently dual-carriageway. Established practice is to explicitly tag the special (and recognisable) case of dual-carriageways with oneway=yes. What I'm saying is that dualled section of trunk highways that are not yet explicitly tagged oneway should now be so tagged. Alternatively, we can introduce highway=gelbe_autobahn that implies oneway and bulk retag the German trunks. > On the other hand, given that localization is likely to happen eventually > anyhow, it may at some point become just a local decision. If we could reliably determine the nationality of a section of road I'd be a lot more relaxed about this matter (and others, like maxspeed). And once that day arrives, as it surely will, we can happily zap tags deemed on a regional level to be implicit. But we're not there yet. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] ref in roundabouts
I'm also against tagging a ref on roundabouts unless it refers specifically _to_ the roundabout, rather than to one of the (by definition) several routes passing through. The very fact that we tag roundabouts with a junction tag emphasises their role as "neutral territory" owned by none (or all, you decide) of the roads feeding it. I've seen arguments in favour of tagging with the ref of the most major through route, but I don't find that compelling. Certainly, you could consider that a roundabout without a ref would create a discontinuity in the through route, but my view is that the junction tag is special and that such discontinuities don't count. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/10 Chris Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > maxspeed:mph only conforms to map features because Shaun amended it earlier > today! > > [listens for the sound of the voting request email to arrive - hears > nothing] Well, two wrongs and all that. Though its worse, IMHO, to do a poo in another man's shed than to build your own shed and do one there ;) Seriously, though, we're currently in a situation where we have a documented truth and a disparate group of people ignoring it in different ways with a view to solving the same problem. What we badly need is a considered truth that everybody can use. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/8 Simon Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > "en" is a language code, not a country code. Not all English-speaking > countries use imperial units on road signs. I think Australia uses > metric, for example. So does the Republic of Ireland. In fact, I believe the only English-speakers that don't are in UK and USA. -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/10 Chris Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Conversions to 0dp is inaccurate, accurate conversions are a mess, > namespacing allows for conflicting values so only an optional suffix really > makes sense, so this why I use. Well, maxspeed:mph would also work for your purposes. The only difference is that you have chosen to silently ignore the behaviour documented in Map Features. I'm not convinced by your point about conflicts - in a world where a single field can have, essentially, different data types in it, I think we've already sacrificed any pretence of orderliness. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/8 Ed Loach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I'd argue that it doesn't make sense, in that if you allow both > maxspeed:mph and maxspeed as valid tags, a way may end up tagged > with both showing contradictory speed information. This would require either 2 mappers not heeding each other's work or one very disorganised mapper. > It makes more > sense to have maxspeed= specified> to avoid the chance of that happening. Doing so prevents simple numerical analysis of the field contents. Nothing can be analysed without pre-processing, and you are very prone to dodgy units (how many ways can you right Miles Per Hour?) Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Map Features, maxspeed and maplint
2008/10/10 Ed Loach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > It seems wrong if anyone can just amend Map Features even if their > preferred method is in the minority. That way leads to chaos. I'm > more than tempted to add "or add an mph suffix to the speed" in the > maxspeed= comments field, to document what is already the widely > followed practice (and to my mind makes more sense than allowing two > maxspeed tags on a single way - surely it is as easy to parse any > optional units as it is to read both maxspeed definitions and decide > based on location which is most likely to be the correct one?). But > presumably someone else might just edit out such an amendment. And here we see the drawback of an anarchy. If anybody can document the truth, the quality of the truth can suffer. This is why discussion is important to restore balance. Consider your word-processing package. Most will allow you to set margins and positions in a number of units: millimetres, centimetres, ems, points, possibly variable concepts like lines and even really wacky units like inches. But the representation of any of these units (except possibly lines) is just a layer of make-up on whatever internal units the program happens to use. It doesn't actually matter to us as users how this is done under the hood, as long as we can still use the kinds of units we like, and as long as the page we print looks the way we want it to. If you suggested to the programmers that they should internally store not just the sizes you had chosen, but also the units you used to express them, they would probably not be very impressed. And yet that's exactly what you advocate for OSM. You want to turn a field whose only documented usage was to store a simple, easily-interpreted number into a string that must be parsed to cater for what is likely to be an ever-increasing range of possible input styles. All so we can achieve a result that can already be achieved with the existing key. The missing functionality (the ability to store both the information of what the original unit was and the value expressed in that unit) can be added using maxspeed:mph. So now we see another drawback of anarchy - with no enforcement of good design, you rely on the crowd to apply it voluntarily. In a world where we will all agree that the tag: maxspeed=six thousand one hundred and eighty furlongs per fortnight ...is utterly daft, where are we going to draw the line? It's possible to parse it in as automated a way as you can maxspeed=30mph. But it's extra work, isn't it? Let's remind ourselves that the project is about the collection of data. By keeping the data as clean as practical, we maximise the uses to which it can be put. > Mappers should be mapping what it is they find. If I find an 11'3" > clearance bridge with a 20mph limit beneath it then that is what I > want to map. Nobody is suggesting you shouldn't do that. I'll certainly express the view that when I drive under that bridge, my km/h speedometer and lack of feet and inches reckoning skills will mean that I'll want that translated into real money, but this is going to be possible wherever you choose to store this information. What I'm saying is that when we have tags that are documented as containing simple numbers interpreted as being in a particular unit, that you should either convert your data into that format or choose another tag where your preferred way of using it doesn't break with the already documented behaviour. > I don't want to have to artificially convert either of > these to metric, or use alternate tags for the same thing. This is an unreasonable position. I can't and won't force you to convert anything, but what you're saying is that you want to store your data under a tag conceived for a different kind of data. And without even any update to the documentation of that tag. How can this be a good thing? > addition of units if they aren't the default should be sufficient. It doesn't help anybody trying to use the data on the terms implied in the docs. Furthermore, you're deciding that your opinion (that the requirement to process units isn't onerous) is more valid that the opinion of the person who first documented maxspeed (that the tag was most valuable as a raw number of implied units). This is a bit like the argument that's going on about whether trunk highways should be implicitly one way, just because mappers in some countries happen to use them only for roads where that is the case. It's just another case of the tail trying to wag the dog. > And for those mappers who aren't reading this discussion, or > watching for un-voted amendments to Map Features, they won't even > know about the minority use tags that were added today. Mappers relying on map features will have a hell of a time coping with that stuff you're adding as maxspeed... Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org ht
Re: [OSM-talk] pub vs café
2008/10/18 Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Are there still proper restaurants in the UK without a license? Can you > then bring your own alcoholic beverages and have them served? I read > something about a "corking fee" related to this, but this may well have > been from 20 years ago. This situation used to be very common in Birmingham on the "Balti Mile". There, Indian restaurants offering affordable (and tasty) food traditionally did not have licences. Off-Licences (shops licensed to sell alcohol for consumption "Off" the premises) began to spring up next door to the restaurants, and members of the public would bring their own beer and wine into the restaurant. A corking fee is exactly what you describe, a surcharge on self-brought (usually) wine, but whether one will apply is very much down to the restaurant itself. Corking fees are not confined to unlicensed restaurants either - it could happen that a customer would choose to bring a very special bottle of wine he owns to enjoy with a meal. A lot of the Birmingham restaurants I mentioned do now have licences, but self-brought booze was still common enough last time I was there. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] pub vs café
2008/10/18 paul youlten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Dermot said: >> "This situation used to be very common in Birmingham on the "Balti >> Mile". There, Indian restaurants offering affordable (and tasty) food >> traditionally did not have licences. " > > I always assumed that this was because most Balti Houses/Indian > Restaurants are run by Bangladeshi Muslims who don't sell alcoholic on > religious grounds. That was my assumption too. But: a) In at least some houses, they would open it and pour it out for you (often for free). b) Many do now have licences. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Denomination tag and how to avoid fragmentation
Hi folks, Until fairly recently, Map Features listed a set of proposed denomination tag values for common world religions. That list included "catholic". I see that it has now been updated to also include "roman_catholic". The new "roman_catholic" option carries a mention of its common usage in Germany, and indeed there has been a recent discussion on the German list about the denomination tag and its most effective use within Germany. At this point, "catholic" and "roman_catholic" are another case of different tags referring to the same thing. I personally have no strong feeling which is the better tag - I had been using "catholic" due to its inclusion in Map Features and JOSM presets. That said, "roman_catholic", while longer, does remove an ambiguity, given that anglican churches (some, at least) are also catholic, though not Roman Catholic. But we should be able to settle on one designation and there is benefit in doing so, while there are fewer cases that will need retagging. Anybody got strong opinions on which value is preferable? Or even a reason why there is value in maintaining two separate values? Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] GeoBase nodes import
2008/12/17 Sam Vekemans : > So for example, importing a park (in a mapped area) we would just show > the outline dots of the park, and the user can connect the dots and > show it the 'right' way osm-style. So we would discard the knowledge of the sequence in which the nodes should be added to the ways? This seems like a bad idea. I've encountered irregular shapes before where having the nodes does not show clearly in which order to connect them. And that's leaving aside the fact that there's an awful lot of work involved in this. Far better to push forward with some of the JOSM enhancements proposed to allow easier management (through hiding) of clutter. Doing this, you could happily namespace the imported ways and users not actively involved with the de-duping task could simply hide them. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Indiscrimate layering
2008/12/20 Brian Quinion : > BTW - it hasn't only changed bridges, also tunnels to -1, and a rather > random looking change to a highway tag from > highway=unclassified;tertiary to highway=unclassified. Well, highway=unclassified;tertiary isn't a sane tagging, so the "fix" at least represents a 50/50 stab at the truth and the road will render. Often, this kind of daft tagging has been a result of what Potlatch does when two unlike road segments are combined. Any sign of Potlatch guarding against this kind of silliness? Yes, I know it now has a warning - _I_ know what it means but I'm not convinced it will help a novice mapper, and by the time the warning is issued, the semicolon is already in place :( Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Some more shops and amenities for the map features page ...
2008/12/20 Ulf Lamping : > Again, I've added some more shop and amenity values to the map features > page (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features), derived > from the tagwatch usage statistics > (http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Europe/En/index.html). I think this is well worth doing. However, I wonder if we can manage a little more consistency: > shop= > computer 115 > department_store 133 > electronics 211 > garden_centre 127 > optician 100 > shoes 140 OK - all in the singular except for electronics and shoes. Probably no reason to try to change these. > amenity= > dentist 133 > doctors 430 It's "doctors" that puzzles me. Why not "doctor"? I know that you are reporting reality here, but maybe we have a chance now to document a more consistent set of tags and perhaps the (possibly few) mappers already using "doctors" would be prepared to retag. > It seemed that for these values there were no real "rivals" with equal > meaning (maybe except for amenity=doctor used 160 times). That's a fair-sized minority. I wonder if the "doctors" camp contains a small number of prolific mappers. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Some more shops and amenities for the map features page ...
2008/12/20 David Earl : > But it's only a name. Now its there, why not just go with the flow? To go with the flow wouldn't be tragic. Thousands of German mappers have to tolerate the fact that we don't use highway=autobahn. But in this instance, we have something like 26% doctor, so there seems to be a need to retag anyway. Doing so in a way that makes it easier for mappers to remember the schema will help. For me, "dentist" makes sense. So does "doctor". So does "surgery" or "medical_practice", if we want to acknowledge that there may be more than one medical professional on site. But "doctors" seems to be a poor fit. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Some more shops and amenities for the map features page ...
2008/12/20 Ulf Lamping : > You're remembering my discussions months ago about voting for tags to get a > good consistent tagging scheme? > > You're also remembering some very prominent persons in this project > mentioned that voting is nuts and we should see what is really mapped out > there? Yes, I remember all that. And I really wasn't trying to shoot the messenger either ;) So let's not get too drawn into this one. Anybody who has been tagging "doctors" who's now motivated to switch to "doctor", feel free, and maybe the renderers will catch up. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OSM on Garmin - raster tiles?
2009/1/6 Gervase Markham : > But it's still fairly ugly :-) As ugly as upside-down labels? To avoid those (if you will allow track up mode) you'd have to have a combination raster and vector mode, which would in turn require a label-free raster map. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Upload of relation from JOSM fails
2009/1/14 Erik Lundin : > When I try to upload any change to relation 36947 (route E 18) from > JOSM, the answer gets > > upload to: http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/relation/36947...connected > got return: 412 with id 36947 I got this same error trying to operate on members of the relation for route E 201, which has more than 1000 members. It looks like either JOSM or API has a lot of work to do in such cases, and if processing takes too long, the operation times out. I too found that Potlatch would succeed in cases where JOSM would not, but that could be a simple matter of a more generous timeout. What I'm not clear about is whether relations with so many members are a good idea. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Upload of relation from JOSM fails
2009/1/14 Frederik Ramm : > Please do not create relations of that size, it helps nobody. +999. This relation wasn't my doing, it just showed up one day. Having said that, if we are going to have a route relation and if E-routes are routes... > The way I usually fix this is by saving the relation XML to a file and then > using "binary search" and the <-- --> operators to narrow down the area in > the XML that contains the buggy way, until I find the (usually one) way > which I can leave out and make everything work. How does Potlatch get around this issue, as a matter of interest? And will API 0.6 help us avoid it? Thanks, Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] NGA Country Files Converter into OSM format
We did a GNS import of place names in Ireland at at time when very few place names were already mapped and the map was full of emptiness. It worked well for us, since the de-duplication task wasn't that bad and it created reference points for future mapping. It is certainly true that accuracy is poor - off by 2km in many cases. But in a from-scratch mapping effort it's easier to re-spot these than it is to create brand new nodes, and even the baseline is better than nothing. I'd be a little more wary of importing such data into a well-mapped area. Dermot -- -- Iren sind menschlich ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] magical road detector to play with
On Thursday, 3 February 2011, Steve Coast wrote: > http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2011/02/03/automatically-detect-roads-with-bing-aerial-imagery.aspx Ooh! Just what I've always wanted. [goes off to play with it] Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage (was: What the license change is going to do to the map)
On 10 February 2011 14:01, Anthony wrote: > Which, by the way, I denied. Tracing aerials does not involve copying data. Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't. Since I began mapping on OSM (which was a while ago) the considered opinion of the project was "Don't trace Google imagery. We're not sure it's legal, they're convinced it isn't and it's certainly a breach of their terms of use. So don't do it. Seriously. Bad things will happen, and it will be your fault" You failed to heed this. Bad things happened. It's _your_ stupid fault. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage (was: What the license change is going to do to the map)
On 10 February 2011 14:24, Anthony wrote: > It definitely doesn't. There's no "maybe" about it. You seem to have missed my substantive point, so let me restate it: You deliberately did something we as a community have chosen not to do. You willfully put the work of others in jeopardy. This is YOUR fault. You are the wrong-doer here. Your selfishness has caused a lot of work for other people. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Bing coverage - more levels
On 11 February 2011 00:00, Dave F. wrote: > In order to see if an area is "super high" (z20) I have to be actually > zoomed in on that area to zoom level 20. Therefore I can tell if it is > hi-res from the Bing imagery. > > I'm really failing to see the purpose of this product. I think the theory is that if you have already done the hard work of zooming in, the next guy won't have to because he'll see the coloured tiles at that location. So it's quite a valid bit of crowd-sourcing, if we accept that the end result is worth having. The end result being that the whole world appears in _some_ colour, even at very low zoom. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Bing coverage - more levels
On 11 February 2011 00:27, Dave F. wrote: > At what zoom level to I have to be at to view an already zoomed in area to > view dark blue (z20)? You could be fairly zoomed out if there are enough adjacent z20 tiles turned dark blue. But yes, it all needs a lot of eyes to be zooming into a lot of tiles. Basically a group effort to cover the whole earth down to a fine level of detail. It'll never work... Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage (was: What the license change is going to do to the map)
On 11 February 2011 01:11, Anthony wrote: > Actually, let me correct that. A tiny fraction (less than 0.001%) of > the OSM community has told me that by deleting contributions which > have absolutely nothing to do with my tracing from Google. What percentage has told you that that what you were doing was OK? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage (was: What the license change is going to do to the map)
On 11 February 2011 01:34, Anthony wrote: > Oh my God. How many times do I have to say this? NO OBJECTS WERE INVOLVED. By now this is all at risk of getting a little like a soap opera, and like with soaps, there is a risk that people coming in at the middle of a storyline will fail to grasp the nuances of the situation. So for their benefit... PREVIOUSLY ON DYNASTY: * Anthony brags about tracing from "Google" (did he mean imagery or maps? Oooh! Cliffhanger) * Many within the project appalled - "Anthony, how could you, everybody knows it's not allowed" * The Man demands to know what objects are tainted. Anthony insists none are. * The Man deletes all of Anthony's contribution and banishes him to the wilderness. Surely only waking up and realising it's a bad dream will save him now. * Various mappers chastise Anthony for having brought this misfortune not only down on his own head, but on those of others. Demand to know why he didn't just answer The Man's question. * Anthony insists that yes, he did trace from Google and that no, none of his contributions represent prohibited content in OSM. * Anthony goes on to have in his possession simultaneously "tea" and "no tea", thereby solving one of the stickier puzzle in the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game[1]. Go Anthony! Stay tuned to today's rivetting episode of Dynasty! Dermot [1] The key to this conundrum, incidentally, was to go rummaging inside your own brain, find and remove your common sense, which would otherwise block any attempt at justifying such an obvious paradox -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage (was: What the license change is going to do to the map)
On 11 February 2011 02:05, wrote: > Was there ever a sequel to that text adventure? It > kind of ended on a cliff-hanger ... Well there was a crucial bit where the protagonist left the planet... Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Fwd: Re: collateral damage
On 11 February 2011 02:09, Anthony wrote: > I think the more interesting question is, if I had demanded that all > my contributions to OSM be removed, would they have been removed? What basis would you have had for such a demand? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Announcement: Availability of True Offset web service
Hi, Many of you will have followed earlier discussions of the True Offset process, intended to solve as simply as possible the problem of imagery offsets by enabling editors to, by default, calibrate background imagery based on offset data managed by mappers. In this way, inexperienced mappers or people tracing without local knowledge can avoid polluting the map with badly offset contributions. The service is now live and seems to be working well on the dev server and I have updated the wiki page to reflect this and some late changes: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/True_Offset_Process The highlights: * You can try it at: http://mackerski.dev.openstreetmap.org/offset/1.0/offset/bing/20/53.26/-6.67 * I have re-documented the meanings of the offset northing and easting to ensure compatibility in units and sign with the offset bookmarks already exposed by the JOSM Imagery module. * This restatement of meaning may lead to a sign shift for one or other of the values. So if you have previously entered offset data for consumption by True Offset, please check that it is still correct. This goes doubly for anybody who recorded offsets based on the earliest proposals which used metres instead of degrees. * Offset Database updates are currently manual (this will change). So for now, if you add or change some offset data, please let me know so I can cause it to take effect. * Most of my test offset data has been for Bing imagery in Ireland. Until the next database update, some of these may be inaccurate. My appeal: If you are a developer of one of the OSM editors that supports background imagery layers, PLEASE build support for True Offset, and please have your editors either apply the corrections silently by default or at the very least prompt users that a known offset exists and offer to use it. While I hope True Offset is useful to experienced mappers who already calibrate their imagery, its real purpose is to avoid the destructive effect of tracing mappers who don't even realise they can or should calibrate. Happy Mapping! Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcement: Availability of True Offset web service
On 18 February 2011 00:08, Ben Last wrote: > Quick question; how does this cope with updates to aerial/satellite imagery > that may change the offset for a given service at a given location? In exactly the same way as, say, the Offset bookmarks offered by JOSM - it doesn't, and the mapper needs to notice that the imagery doesn't seem to line up any more. As such, as a baseline, using True Offset is at worst no worse than other options for managing your calibration. Though in fact, because the correction factors are maintained by the crowd, the story is actually likely to be more positive than that. With private offset bookmarks on JOSM, each individual mapper needs to notice the change and recalibrate, hopefully doing an accurate job. With True Offset, the first mapper to notice the change can update the stored offset. Others may fine-tune it. Everybody else just keeps mapping without noticing any change. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcement: Availability of True Offset web service
On 18 February 2011 04:08, Steve Bennett wrote: > For imagery sources like NearMap*, which support a time dimension, > maybe it's worth including some kind of date field? That would also be > helpful for imagery that, even if you can't access older imagery, can > at least tell you the date of the current stuff, so you'd know if the > offset was out of date. Not impossible to incorporate into the service, but where should the date info come from? The solution doesn't know or care about imagery tiles, which would be the obvious source. > Relying on a "mapper to notice that the > imagery doesn't seem to line up" seems to defeat the purpose of the > whole thing a bit, in my eyes. I respectfully disagree. Today's best solution to the problem requires every mapper to: * Realise that the default calibration may be incorrect * Adjust for the error per mapping session, either manually or through storing and subsequently reusing a bookmark * Notice whether changes in the base imagery render the assumed correction factor incorrect and to then recalibrate where that occurs. True offset requires no more than one mapper to do those things. The chances of any given mapping session producing offset data are thereby reduced. The only dangerous situation I can foresee is where an offset in a particular area is corrected once, subsequently corrected in the base imagery _but_ not one single active mapper in the area notices the fix and therefore the True Offset correction endures, _and_ where future mappers blindly believe the imagery even though offset from other data mapped in the area. My assumption is that this is unlikely in real life. For a correction to have been stored in the first place requires that an active mapper of clue has been interested in the area and has traced from that same imagery. It is unlikely that he will abandon the area, but if he does, it will likely have reached a level of completeness sufficient to cause a mapper of less clue to assume that the imagery is right and the existing data wrong. But again, even _if_ this were to happen, I think OSM will still experience a net rise in the accuracy of imagery traced. > And yes, it is worse, because mappers could end up applying a false > offset. and not knowing. They already do that several hundred times a day. It will happen less if we have a solution like True Offset in the mix. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Announcement: Availability of True Offset web service
On 18 February 2011 23:35, Steve Bennett wrote: > Ok, I think you're probably right. One thing that would mitigate the > situation I was talking about would be if OSM editors display the > current offset somewhere on the screen. Maybe a little red arrow > pointing in the appropriate direction (and perhaps length indicating > the distance of the offset). Hmm, not bad - that is, at any stage that the imagery has been moved from its default position, there would be a subtle but visible indicator? That fits in pretty well with our underlying goals with True Offset, to make sure no mapper traces without realising that alignment is sometimes wrong, must be considered and can be changed. That suggestion, of course, would need to be taken up by the authors of each editor. Cheers, Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] OSM is dying (was Re: We Need to Stop Google's Exploitation of Open Communities)
On 11 April 2011 16:41, Ian Dees wrote: > When Google turns Google MapMaker on in the US and Europe*, it will become > much harder to recruit new mappers to our community (that is already quite > small). Being passive about this issue means that OSM and its more-open data > will eventually be drowned out by Google's much greater marketing might. (With apologies to the wonderful Slashdot troll team...) It is official; Netcraft now confirms: OSM is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered OSM community when IDC confirmed that OSM market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all online maps. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that OSM has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. OSM is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Neogeographer's comprehensive route-finding test. You don't need to be Gulliver to predict OSM's future. The hand writing is on the wall: OSM faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for OSM because OSM is dying. Things are looking very bad for OSM. As many of us are already aware, OSM continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Mapping parties are the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of participants to the shinier Google (™) mapping parties complete with jelly beans and free massages. The sudden and unpleasant departure of long time OSM contributor Fake SteveC only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: OSM is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. OSM founder SteveC states that there are over 500k mappers in OSM. How many active mappers are there? Let's see. The number of anti-ODbL posts on the OSM mailing lists versus those praising the OSMF in the strongest possible terms is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 12.33 active mappers. Attendance at a recent Google Mapping Party, cunningly disguised as a flash mob, was estimated to contain 100k disgruntled former OSM mappers. A recent article put indignant Germans who argue instead of mapping at about 80 percent of total OSM mappers. Therefore there are about -200k OSM contributors (adjusting for those who are demanding their data back). This is consistent with the number of incidents of drunk barge owners tripping over ropes and landing in the canal. Due to the Cyprus edit war, abysmal sales and so on, the Java Applet went out of business and was taken over by Pot Latch which makes another troubled map. Now API 0.5 is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that OSM has steadily declined in market share. OSM is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If OSM is to survive at all it will be among bearded hippies too behind the times to have discovered Waze. OSM continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save OSM from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, OSM is dead. -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] CC-BY-SA still available? (was: OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement)
On 13 April 2011 15:15, Ed Avis wrote: > What's the plan for deciding whether and when to cut off CC-BY-SA > distribution? > Would it require a 2/3 vote of contributors? I guess the problem with continuing to allow CC distribution of the data is that that would leave OSM unprotected in those jurisdictions where CC isn't recognised for map data. Given that this is a main goal of the change, it seems that removing CC as a possible licence (for the data at least - it might be that it would be OK for map tiles) can't be avoided. That said, under the new CT, the door seems to remain open to a reintroduction of a (later version, improved?) CC licence if such were deemed to be Free and Open and subject to the 2/3 mandate. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 14 April 2011 18:12, Nathan Edgars II wrote: > > Nathan Edgars II wrote: >> What happens in the future if I decline? Can I accept at a later date? >> > > Since there has been no response to this, I plan to: > *hold off on accepting or declining with my NE2 account > *create a new account, publicly linked to NE2, for contributions under the > CT > This seems to be the only way to continue to 'vote' against the change. Let me start by answering your question - declining now does allow you to accept at a later date. But your suggested course of action has me confused - you are happy to make contributions under the new CT and intend to do so, but yet you wish to vote against the change. Your choice, I supposed. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 14 April 2011 19:05, Nathan Edgars II wrote: > Thank you. Do you speak for the OSMF? No - hence my silence and no doubt that of others when you asked before. But I have been following the licence issue attentively and have seen this question answered more than once from "official" sources. > I oppose the change, primarily because of the damage it will cause. I've > already seen what removing small amounts of data will do > (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2011-March/057318.html) and > do not wish to see more of this. > > On the other hand, I wish to continue to contribute, and, because I am happy > to contribute into the public domain, I cannot, under my personal ethics, > decline. I applaud your ethics, but it seems to me that your chosen course of action, unless you do intend to accept at a later stage for your existing account, will contribute more to the damage you fear than to the smooth transition many of us would like to see. Witholding one's data from the new licence, especially if there is no objection to that licence, is not a very sane way to avoid damage to the map. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 14 April 2011 19:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote: > I see it logical. Wanting to contribute to the currently biggest, > most fun free map, with most impact on the industry and a name you got > used to, you soon will have no choice other than to do so under then > new CT because that free map is ruled by people in favor of it. Yet > the accept/decline buttons are your first chance to vote or express > what you think about the switch if you want to have some say in this > (quite important for the project) decision. So use this chance, vote > with your data as someone said at the beginning of the process. This > is also the only way left to find out what the mappers think. Ah, but is it _your_ data? Or might you have built some of it on top of mine? Or perhaps I built in good faith on a foundation you created. So by all means state your opinion and by all means share your opinions with other mappers. But if, once a consensus is clear, "The Community" comes out in favour of the change, many of us will think very ill of people who still choose to pull out the bottom brick from the wall and go home. Because that's not the kind of community I've had the privilege to belong to. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 14 April 2011 23:38, David Murn wrote: > Its not terribly confusing from here. What he is suggesting, is > creating an account to contribute 'clean' data, which he is prepared to > agree to OSMF's terms about. What he is voting against, is OSMF using > previously created data which is not practical to split the 'clean' from > 'tainted'. He didn't say that - there is enough FUD in this discussion without inventing more. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 15 April 2011 00:08, David Murn wrote: > So, please feel free to tell me where I invented anything? Right here: "What he is voting against, is OSMF using previously created data which is not practical to split the 'clean' from 'tainted'." As quoted in my earlier mail. Nothing in Nathan's mails suggested that practicalities or tainted data have any bearing on his decision. That is what you have invented - it might indeed be _your_ reason for voting against, and I would certainly have to respect that. But please stick to facts, this process is complicated enough as it is. Indeed, the last comment on this page indicates that tainted data are certainly not a feature of Nathan's contributions: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NE2 Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 15 April 2011 23:21, Ian Dees wrote: > At what point was the entire (active) OSM community asked if they wanted to > relicense their data? If they haven't (I certainly wasn't) then when will > we? Is this accept/decline that vote? If so, how do I vote no? How do I vote > yes but withhold the option of changing my vote when I see the final > license? Well, I'm not trolling either, though this probably isn't the answer you were looking for. Still, it's one way of breaking what seems to be a deadlock: Ian, could I ask you to consider agreeing to license your work to date under ODbL? And in addition, to agree to the new CTs, which seem to me to contain important provisions to avoid orphaning our map data if for some reason we are not around to agree to some later legally significant point that a significant majority of the Community active at that time agrees is necessary? So now that you've been asked, the discussion can turn in the IMHO more productive direction of dealing with actual concerns with the change rather than the protocol. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 16 April 2011 00:07, Ian Dees wrote: > Thanks for asking me (if this were a vote my answer would be "No", but in > the interest of moving on from this nonsense and keeping data flowing I'll > eventually say "Yes"), but the important part of my question was everyone > else -- the community of OpenStreetMap. When were *they* asked? FWIW I would have favoured earlier specific requests for a vote, but it's basically been an impossible position for the LWG from what I can see as an outsider. On the one hand, everybody wants to feel consulted about the change. On the other, plenty of people have complained throughout the process about being offered a half-baked solution. Turns out this stuff is complicated. I'm not the first person to say so on the lists, but it seems to bear repeating - the process has not been a secret, the key details of what problem the change attempts to solve have been documented for a long time now and absolutely anybody with a thirst for knowledge on the matter has had many resources at his or her disposal. When I first became aware of the documentation and read it, I certainly felt consulted, and very soon after it became possible to indicate approval, it was clear to me both that the promoters of the change wished me to do so (at that point I felt "asked") and how I might go about doing so. As of Sunday, we are now aware, those not yet to vote yes are to "asked" to vote yes or no. It remains unclear whether an OSMF message is to be a part of this asking - I would tend to feel this would be a good thing, as some mappers just wanna have fun^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H map, and may well not know about this process at all. Many mappers have had concerns and actual difficulties with some of the consequences of the changes. Some of them have engaged positively in the process to try and find an accommodation. Many... quite frankly haven't. I started mapping with OSM in good faith and expecting good faith from other mappers. So far I have only been disappointed by those mappers who willfully vandalised the map or undermined it through tainted data. This licence change now gives every mapper the means of undermining the map through withholding of their own data, once freely given and now very likely a foundation of data created by other mappers, also in good faith. I understand that many mappers feel they _can't_ relicense some or all of their work, and that's a really tough situation. But mappers who just plain _won't_ agree to leave their data in, even though there is no legal obstacle to it, should strongly consider whether they are being true to the community they claim to be a part of. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 16 April 2011 07:00, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > Why does the ODbL faction not start with a fork of ODbL compliant data? > Why do they need to force a split of the existing CC-by-SA data? A lot of the differences of opinion on this matter are finding expression in the words people choose to use to describe the different points of view. I found your use of "faction" interesting enough to check some dictionary definitions of the word. Here's one I found particularly apt: 1. a group of people forming a minority within a larger body, esp a dissentious group So let's see which point of view ends up mainstream and which belongs to a dissenting minority. So far, as I look at the volume of map data, as I look at the vast majority of the people who have built and maintained the map and the infrastructure on which it runs, what I see is people who, sometimes with misgivings, are throwing their weight behind the licence change. Among such people I see unity of purpose. Opposition to the change seems to stem from a number of disparate of often contradictory reasons, none of which I personally find compelling. What I can not with any seriousness regard the opposition I have seen as is "the mainstream". It is on the anti-change side that I see not one faction, but several. Others may not (yet) share my view, and should observe the rate at which the remaining community votes yes and no. Nothing in this process will remove the freedom from anybody to continue to use the data already mapped exactly as they always have, nor to continue maintaining a data set under those terms. But if The Community should be seen to support the licence change, I will see it as irresponsible for individual mappers to take their ball and go home just because they can. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 16 April 2011 08:28, Russ Nelson wrote: > In every schism, it's not clear who is splitting from whom. Don't > presume an answer without first asking the question. Actually, I have thought widely on this. My slightly earlier email this morning outlines my thought on what defines the "mainstream" in this difficult issue. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] OpenStreetMap License Change Phase 3 Pre-Announcement
On 16 April 2011 08:31, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > So has anyone asked the FOSS gurus of licensing? > I have never seen it mentioned while I was subscribed to legal-talk. I > am quite prepared to start writing emails (phrased neutrally) requesting > an opinion if these people have not been asked before. > > If then the opinion is that the new licence has merit, we then need > work on how the contract provisions "fit in" with other legal codes not > just those derived from either the Westminster or Napoleonic codes. How long have you been in this discussion, Elizabeth? Quite a while, according to my recollection. Given that you seem to now see a requirement for this kind of validation, I find it strange that you wouldn't have sought it at a much earlier stage than this. Normally abject opposition should come after, not before, "neutral" appraisal of the proposal, shouldn't it? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] License graph
On 19 April 2011 00:08, David Murn wrote: > I actually meant that the 2 graphs had different scales. When youre > showing numbers upto 80, fair enough use a scale of 0-100, but dont use > 0-100 on one and 0-120 on the other, and call it an even comparison. > Skewing graphs is a 5th-grade maths lesson. I didn't see anybody call it an even comparison. The graphing tool use is, as far as I know, choosing its own scale for each line more or less as a consequence of its core purpose of graphing server stats. Those are not comparison graphs, just two graphs that happen to sit on the same axes. We have to do our own mental processing. But even with different scales, the wedge shape that's opening up between the lines tells us all we need to know. We could play with the scale to see how quickly it's happening, but that's about all. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] License graph
On 19 April 2011 13:14, Elizabeth Dodd wrote: > On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:51:06 +0200 > Frederik Ramm wrote: > >> One small plea: Could you refrain from saying "the camp that wants to >> move to the ODbL". It sounds like it's a small bunch of people when >> indeed it is the overwhelming majority. > > well that's just meadowdust. > The ODbL camp did not even get a majority of the OSMF members to vote > in favour of "the method of changeover". > To make your majority you add in X thousand who joined late and didn't > get a vote, and subtract Y thousand who haven't yet made an edit. In addition to lacking skills of politeness it seems you cannot count either. Since the artificially-fixed epoch of last Sunday - prior to which over 10,000 users agreed to the change, explicitly, not automatically - the stats of yes versus no decisions, excluding those existing yeses, are, as I type this mail: Yes: 708 (88%) No: 95 (12%) Fred describes this as an overwhelming majority. You disagree. based on some hand-wavy logic and a suggestion of deceit involving new signups when it is abundantly clear that such new signups do not form part of the claim you hope to dispute. Stick to the facts. Learn to add and subtract. Learn some basic human courtesy. Stop the accusations of deceit when you are the one presenting the false information. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Breaking up is hard to do (was New Logo in the Wiki)
On 4 May 2011 18:21, Nic Roets wrote: > I rejected the CTs because I felt the OSMF* was out of touch with the > community. Your statement just reaffirms that. The Community, by my definition, is made up of the people who map, most of whom are not members of OSMF. The change in licence and CTs has been endorsed massively by The Community. I won't make any blanket judgement on people who feel they have to say no to the change - some are indeed in tricky situations - but I find your very premise flawed. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment
On 8 June 2011 17:59, Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer wrote: > I am willing to grant the OSFM + 2/3 of the community the right to relicense > my contributions in the following ways: > * the current versions of the ODbL and/or of the CC-BY-SA, > * all past and future versions of the ODbL and/or of the CC-BY-SA, > * all licenses that follow the Share-Alike/Copyleft principle, and That's not a bad start - but if I play spot-the-missing-bit, it looks to me that you aren't prepared to trust 2/3 of the community to decide that (for reasons not yet forseen) a licence other than the two you list and which may not be copyleft/sharealike. The difficulty I see is what might happen under those unforseen circumstances. Let's take a fanciful (but not impossible) assumption that in 50 years, the various map data providers operating either free beer or speech policies (as of today that would include OSM for speech and Google for beer) have transformed the landscape to the extent that Navteq decides that map data is a commodity, that they too will give away what they have, will integrate the concept of Community into their data maintenance and otherwise try to out-OSM OSM. Now, keep in mind that this is a fanciful example, so let's not be sidetracked by whether we think they would ever do such a thing. The issue is that the OSM Community at that time would find themselves having to consider how OSM should fit in a world where this had happened. Let's further suppose that some users of geodata continued to find obstacles to using OSM, but seized on the opportunity to exploit this newly freed Navteq data which, let's just suppose, had been declared PD. Such a development might in fact prove to be a game-changer. The OSM Community might well find that, in a world where geodata is often PD, sharealike is the kiss of death for a project. It therefore seems important to equip The Community of the future to decide on all aspects of future licence policy, including a yes or no to sharealike. Your preference should a situation like this arise seems to be: > * all other licenses if I am contacted and do not object within 6 weeks. So in 50 years time (and I hope that we are both still alive to cast our vote at that time), each of us will get the chance to express ourselves on this important matter. My interpretation of your 6 week timeout is that, should you be unreachable, bored or dead, The Community is free to make the decision without you, and that's certainly an improvement over where we are today. But suppose you are reachable - suppose you consider the issue for a week and decide to say no, but a solid majority of mappers say yes. 50 years worth of the stuff you mapped and anything sitting on top of it (which I'm going to claim will, by then, have diluted your own stuff into insignificance) will have to be removed somehow. And that's just not fair. If your data gets contributed to a project where it will by definition be mixed with those of other mappers you have to accept that the decision-making process of what may be fairly done with the mixed data set must also be shared with those same mappers. We can talk about what percentage should constitute a strong majority. We can talk about how to prevent gerrymandering of the pool of eligible voters. But we shouldn't and mustn't talk about vetoes. Today every "old" mapper has a veto on changes of this sort. Your list above proposes to grant a one-time mandate to allow for a specific foreseen licence change deemed necessary. But it proposes to retain the veto. Not one of us is so important to OSM that he or she has the right to stand in the way of the accountable will of The Community. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ legal-talk mailing list legal-t...@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On Friday, 10 June 2011, Ben Laenen wrote: > then why is it making all the decisions on the new license? Or am I then > misunderstanding how the whole process is taking place? I suggest that you are. We the mappers are making the decisions based on a proposal drawn up at great length by OSMF. And mappers will continue to hold the power over future decisions of this sort. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 10 June 2011 21:38, Nic Roets wrote: > 2. How do they know that there is overwhelming support from the > community ? (I don't believe the license change passed this test) and Close to 99% of mappers who actively voted supported the change. > 3. And waiting for the community to get 100% behind a change can take > a very long time. If we want to compete with Google Map Maker, we may > need to act much faster. Here I agree with you fully. This is why the CT are hugely important to the future of the project. You have declined them. How do you propose that we, as a project, equip ourselves to react quickly in a way that does not require 100% support? > In the short term people should either become OSMF members or live > with the consequences. In the long term, we could adopt a process > where voting does not cost anything. (For example, I recently received > a couple of messages from Wikimedia saying that my small number of > edits made me eligible to vote in their election). How much did it cost you to cast your no vote? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 10 June 2011 22:16, TimSC wrote: > I think you are confusing "support the relicense" with "accept the > relicense" and that difference is significant. Not at all - I know of no form of democracy that distinguishes between grudging acceptance or evangelical zeal. In particular, in direct democracy such as a referendum, small groups always design the question that will be put to the electorate, tuning it as required so it will command the support of a sufficient majority while still achieving the goal. If a sufficient majority votes yes (and this is often also referred to as "supporting" the referendum), it is carried. If close to 99% votes yes then it is common to talk of overwhelming support. Will some voters be grumbling that they didn't like how the question was posed? Sure they will. But the result is still binding, because that's how democratic decisions work. We attack the principles of democracy at our peril - most of the tried alternatives are quite nasty. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
I'd like to save Nic the trouble of taking issue with my claim below - I've since realised that he reversed his no vote, something that changes very much the character of the point he was making. Sorry Nic, Dermot On 10 June 2011 21:50, Dermot McNally wrote: > On 10 June 2011 21:38, Nic Roets wrote: >> 3. And waiting for the community to get 100% behind a change can take >> a very long time. If we want to compete with Google Map Maker, we may >> need to act much faster. > > Here I agree with you fully. This is why the CT are hugely important > to the future of the project. You have declined them. How do you > propose that we, as a project, equip ourselves to react quickly in a > way that does not require 100% support? -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 10 June 2011 23:01, Nathan Edgars II wrote: > I cannot think of any democratic process where only the 'yes' voters are > allowed to participate in the results. Can you? About a year ago, Bavaria held a referendum to ban smoking in just about all indoor public places including pubs, restaurants and Beer Tents. Non-smokers were free to vote "no", and we must presume that many did. But because the vote was carried they are no longer free to smoke in those places. They are, of course, free to use them without smoking indoors. Just as opponents of the OSM licence change will be free to participate in OSM post-change, just not under their preferred terms. It seems a perfect analogy. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 10 June 2011 23:35, Nathan Edgars II wrote: > It's a flawed analogy, since there were two decisions for smokers: whether > to vote yes or no on the referendum, and (after it passed) whether to > patronize these places. With OSM there is only one decision; someone who > 'votes' against the change gets their contributions removed, as if someone > who voted no on the referendum was no longer allowed to visit the pub and > grab a beer with friends. Not at all. It's not a perfect analogy, but it covers perfectly the future right of the no voters to continue to use the facility. In the OSM context, this is possible by either accepting the terms and keeping your previous contributions on the map or (for whatever reason) standing by the no vote and creating another account. That the no voter would prefer not to have to do all this is clear, but then democracy always disappoints somebody. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 11 June 2011 00:15, Nathan Edgars II wrote: > I think you're being deliberately obtuse That's amusing coming from somebody who thinks he can inhibit the use of data he has declared as PD, but let's carry on... >, but I'll continue to assume > otherwise. In a democracy, there are no personal consequences for voting > either way. One's vote is counted, and *the final tally is the only thing a > vote counts for*. If yes voters and no voters are treated differently after > the vote, it's not a democratic vote. Switzerland around the same time held a referendum on whether to ban the building of Minarets. I expect that many Muslims voted against the ban. The referendum was carried. No voters _are_ treated differently after the vote. The vote was democratic by any definition. It happens to be IMO a very dark incident for democracy, but that doesn't take away from the facts. > Hence the new license acceptance > process is not a democratic vote. Your definition of democracy does not seem to accord with mine. Where did you get it? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 11 June 2011 01:02, Nic Roets wrote: > I would quite like to take my data and start my own PD / CC0 project. > So by simply matching my new license to the conditions set by the > OSMF, I would be voting "yes" in your "referendum". Of course, you are free to do that. So we need to measure OSMF by standards different to those which we would expect from a national government. OSMF can't force you to pay tax and can't divest you of any data you own. Their only leverage is over how or whether you get to use resources that they are managing. And as the managers of those resources they find themselves taking an interest in licence stuff that most of us don't consider all that often. > In this "referendum", the OSMF substantially influenced the outcome by > declaring beforehand "We are changing the license". They refused to > register new users who do not vote "yes". The emails that was sent out > only listed the advantages of the license change. Sounds very sneaky the way you portray it. Sins of omission? They should probably have linked to arguments both for and against from the wiki pages outlining the plan. Come to think of it, that's exactly what they did. Odd that you didn't mention it. > I am not saying OSMF acted illegally or that the license change is a > bad thing. I am merely saying that the OSMF decided on the license > change before there was overwhelming support for it from the > community. Was The Community ever going to beat a path to the OSMF demanding a licence change? I doubt it. Does that mean that we didn't need one? It does not. Most mappers, and I include myself, are very happy that Somebody Else(tm) runs the servers, scrounges for the funds, made a slippy map work and generally gives us what we need so we can just go out and map. Should the people hosting the data not be at the core of thinking about the legal aspects? It's not like the rest of us were queuing up to have our say. > The license change was not driven by the community. It was > driven by a few individuals. How else can you explain the dismally low > voter turn out when the OSMF members voted on it ? It was driven by the few individuals who took an interest in the matter. They were not secretive about their project, indeed evangelical is the word I would use. For a long time they were met with a large round of indifference, as reflected in the poll turnout you mention. Licences, we discover, are just not sexy. "It'll all sort itself out" is a common reaction to stuff we find too abstract to care about. It's alright not to care. It's not alright to invent problems that don't exist. So anyway, we've come further in the process. It turns out that in order to find out what people think you have to steal their football and not give it back until they tell you. Democracy might be fair, but it turns out it's pretty boring too. Still, we know now that an overwhelming number of mappers are sufficiently OK with the change. Some aren't, for various reasons. And that's a shame. But those of you who aren't need to consider a few things. You need to realise that you're not the only ones here. You need to realise that there are a _lot_ of smart people contributing to OSM and most of them are OK with this. You need to understand that if you try to use "your" data as leverage you are typically jeapordising the contributions of lots of your fellow mappers. You need to remember that this change isn't the final roll of the dice. You didn't like the way this change was proposed, promoted, voted upon? Well, the new CTs define in some detail how it has to be done in the future. That's progress. You would have preferred PD/Beerware/CC-BY-stand-on-one-leg? Groovy - just find 2/3 of active mappers who want that too and it can happen without all the accusations of bad faith we've had this time around. In summary - if we were in the business of immediate perfection in OSM nothing would have gone into the map until the whole world was fully surveyed. We do incremental mapping. Learn to attain your licencing goals the same way. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 11 June 2011 00:53, John F. Eldredge wrote: > True. I clicked the button to accept the license, since this was necessary > in order to continue editing, but I don't much care for the license. In > particular, I disliked the fact that you had to agree in advance, sight > unseen, to any future changes in the license. Wasn't this a provision of CC-BY-SA too? Why is it only a problem when applied to ODbL? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 11 June 2011 02:13, John F. Eldredge wrote: > When I signed up in the first place, I was required to say "I accept having > my data placed under the CC-by-SA license", but, unlike the new license, I > was not required to waive my right to have a say in any future license change. You are not waiving your right to have a say with the new CT. You are waiving your right to have a veto. I can't name a single mapper important enough to have one of those. > The OSMF is replacing democracy with oligarchy, so that, in the future, no >mappers except the tiny fraction who are members of the OSMF will have a say >in any future license change, such as changing over to charging for the use of >map data. No, we've never had democracy prior to CT. What we've had is a situation where any one mapper may erect a barrier to whatever decision needs to be made. CT replaces this with democracy requiring a 2/3 majority of active mappers. Those mappers do not have to be OSMF members as your comments above suggest. Have you actually read the CT? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 11 June 2011 13:21, TimSC wrote: > 4) Join the OSMF as a member (people keep suggesting this but I don't > actually agree!) This might be a good point for you to outline how you think important stuff should be organised - how to ensure servers are bought and stay up, how to watch over issues of licence and how decisions should be taken. A difficulty with any status quo is that dissenting opinions tend to be expressed in terms relative to that status quo, which can seem negative. What's the better way? Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Poll on Governance, what constitutes news, wiki front page
On 13 June 2011 14:41, TimSC wrote: > So I ask any interested parties and Richard: please respond with a > definition of what constitutes "news" and/or some reasoning that it is "one > person's hobbyhorse", otherwise I will revert you back. Also if you want to > raise awareness of the poll, I would appreciate some support here! ;) It was put very succinctly by somebody earlier - paraphrasing, you know something is news if it's important enough that somebody other than the person who did it thinks it's news. In a similar vein, Wikipedia takes a dim view of people writing an article about themselves. We all have diary pages to publicise our OSM deeds that we think people care about. If they actually do, somebody else will post it as news. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Join the OSMF !
On 14 June 2011 05:18, Russ Nelson wrote: > Nathan was being gracious. You ARE trolling. Stop it. I like to assume good faith on the lists. I have never for a moment doubted the sincerity of your position on the licence change, and I demand the same courtesy from you. It's acceptable for people to draw different conclusions from the same data. In a democracy, a majority decides which way a decision should fall. > Very likely many non-Muslims voted against the ban. They were NOT > treated differently after the vote. Stop arguing that accepting the > license means anything more than accepting the license, Dermot. It > doesn't. In particular, I accepted the license because I know that if > I do not, then my (rather significant) contributions would be deleted, > and I would be banned from further contributions. I can and have > accepted the license without approving of it. That too is a reason to accept. Most countries and organisations avoid the kind of micro-democracy that would have avoided the situation we have today in OSM where some people (a minority) complain that they are being asked to "vote" (or "pronounce", "decide", "choose" if you don't want to call it a vote) on the wrong question and that they would prefer to have been asked a different question. Such a micro-democracy would never have managed to agree on a question to ask, and while this might be a useful outcome for those who favour the status quo, that seems to me a lot like one group asserting its will over another not by constituting a majority, but by constituting a loud enough minority (UN Security Council springs to mind here). So instead of a micro-democracy, we have ended up with a central group of people producing the proposal on which ultimately all mappers needed to take a decision. As will be clear, I tend to agree with the thrust of their reasoning and I find that the people involved are honest and have the good of the project at heart. But is it not still unfair that specifically that group got to come up with the proposal? Not at all. And again, I'd like to come back to how democratic governments tend to work. If you look at the role of the OSMF in advancing the licence change initiative, one option is to consider that they were acting in the manner of a government. This might grate if you take the view that you never voted for them. But ultimately, it isn't just governments that get to propose laws. Minority groups in parliaments, right down to single independent members, also get to do so. And in the case of the Bavarian smoking ban, a law change even came from an ad-hoc group of citizens. So the right to propose legislation (or, in this case, a licence change) is not some mysterious one. There is no reason any grouping within the project cannot form to promote a different change - in fact, any group that wishes to do so will find it much easier to do so once the initial change to CT is made because of the 66% majority. "But", I (continuously) hear you point out, "the OSMF is uniquely well-placed to force through its will because it controls the servers.". This is, of course, true. I can counter with the usual retort that it is everyone's option to fork and that this is the defense against an evil Foundation. You can counter that OSMF will still prevail as it enjoys recognition as the one true fork. And we all go away frowning. Thing is, even an evil foundation would have to consider the sustainability of a post-CT data set. On the one hand, OSMF has the advantage that it could, using the servers and domains it controls, move to ODbL under CT with, say 20% of today's data - technically they are not even subject to any democratic decision of mappers. To return briefly to the issue of legislation sponsored by a government, the cabinet in planning the legislation needs to keep it sufficiently reasonable that it will pass a vote by a majority of the house. Opposition-sponsored bills are harder. They require the same majority and you know that government party can defeat it on a whim. Such a bill needs to be so strong it its merit that even your political rivals will go for it. The Bavarian referendum on the smoking ban is probably closest to our licence change, and even here, a defined majority of the turnout is sufficient to carry the law. In our "vote" the OSMF had both the theoretical latitude to ignore democracy and operate without a majority, but also the practical constraint that anything less than an overwhelming mandate would screw up the map beyond redemption. This much stronger imperative informed the entire process of licence selection. The process was not a secret and nobody's consent was taken for granted. The eventual proposal is one that failed to please many, for all kinds of reasons. Russ, I've already publicly stated that you did the decent thing by agreeing to the change despite your many difficulties with the process. As far as I'm concerned, barring those mappers who have contributed data incompatib
Re: [OSM-talk] Users who disagree to ODbL but want PD / CC0
On 16 June 2011 15:34, Floris Looijesteijn wrote: > Could we then export change 2 to a PD database first and > import that into ODbL OSM? Wouldn't it be much simpler for those users to simply accept CT? PD is a superset of CT and ODbL after all... Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Users who disagree to ODbL but want PD / CC0
On 16 June 2011 16:04, ce-test, qualified testing bv - Gert Gremmen wrote: > No, it would be simpler for OSM. Works for me - I'm an OSM mapper and the work in question is from OSM mappers. Floris' comments talk about "saving as much data as possible", by context, saving it for "OSM". The easiest way to do this is as I have suggested. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Users who disagree to ODbL but want PD / CC0
On 16 June 2011 16:55, Thomas Davie wrote: > If we convince them to release under PD, then we can take their work and then > license it as ODbL, so not wanting their work licensed ODbL precludes > releasing under PD. Notwithstanding the fact that much of the reasoning here would not be out of place in the Vatican... If there are mappers who would happily tick a box saying something like: "I authorise absolutely anybody to use the data I have contributed in any way that pleases them", but who prefer not to tick the one we currently have for the CT, and if such an additional box would stand up legally, then sure, why the hell not? A former president of Ireland managed to fudge his oath of office and finally take his seat in Parliament through a broadly similar stunt. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Users who disagree to ODbL but want PD / CC0
On 16 June 2011 18:55, Robert Kaiser wrote: > I know at least one person who does exactly that just because he wants to > harm the OSMF because he disagrees with the processes - not with the > outcome, though. The harm he's doing is to the other mappers in the areas he has mapped. Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Aerial photo offsets
On 7 November 2011 08:50, Janko Mihelić wrote: > The leader of the project, Dermot McNally, talked at the Vienna state of the > map. There is no video, but there are slides: > > http://sotm-eu.org/slides/46_DermotMcNally_TrueOffset.pdf > > If I understood right, some code was written. Hi - I'm just seeing this now. Not only is code written, the service is up and running on the dev server (or was, it has been neglected in the past while). The biggest lack at the moment is editor support from the three main editors, whose developers have more ideas than time. See also here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/True_Offset_Process Dermot -- -- Igaühel on siin oma laul ja ma oma ei leiagi üles ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Rebuild plan (followups to rebuild list, please)
Dear Community, I have waited a day to reply to the sudden wave of feedback regarding the rebuild task list and plan. In this way I hope to ensure that my reply is constructive and useful. I urge others to adopt a similar approach. It would be nice to be able to claim that it was gratifying to see such a sudden surge of interest in a topic for which it has, until now, been difficult to drum up much enthusiasm. Those who have participated in the process of getting us to the point where we have a plan and an emerging toolset - they deserve our thanks and they have mine. Those who have chosen to snipe, often in non-specific terms, at this plan, imperfect though it may be, well, I think they should consider how things get done around here. Clearly they would have done a better job and it's unfortunate that they did not step forward in a timely fashion and do so. All this being said, allow me to address those criticisms that have been made in specific enough terms to allow it. There is a risk I will leave out something important, but something tells me I'll hear about that soon enough. I will politely request that followups be made to rebu...@openstreetmap.org, a list that is open to all interested parties and that exists for the purpose of such discussions as this. I personally will assume that any followup not to rebuild@ is unproductive punditry that need not be addressed in actual planning. "The plan should be postponed until after April 1st" To this I will simply state that deadlines are a Good Thing when you are trying to get something done. Until we have completed this task it is good that we should work to some deadlines even if they have to evolve in the light of circumstances. If a safe rebuild or a portion of it really has to slip beyond 1st April then that will have to happen. There is, however, no virtue in ensuring that we slip by a token few days just to prove that the world will not end. But be assured that the plan is a living document that will not ignore emerging realities. "There should be _much_ more test runs and validation of the edits made" The more testing the better, this is clear. I hope that those calling for improvements here have read, understood and fed back weaknesses found in the test suite: https://github.com/zerebubuth/openstreetmap-license-change (all files test*) Unlesss you prefer to systematically verify every object in the planet file, this will provide the single greatest chance of successful data migration. We do also need spot checking of data changes made to a real API database and this is planned. It will need manpower, of course, something that is still lacking in this process. Let me recap on the planned nature of these tests - as can be seen from the plan, this weekend is to see a test run on a subset or subsets of the data set on the dev server, these subsets being chosen for being representative of many of the important test cases (and probably having regard to the locations where volunteer data checkers have the local knowledge to most easily spot unexpected behaviour). As this is a fast moving process, the plan does not yet reflect the fact that we also hope to commisison the new database server and install a full API database. The redaction process will then also be commenced on this box (we have a choice whether to test the offline or online redaction), something that will give us the fairest benchmark (and the most random distribution of test cases) possible. Even during the running of this full planet test it will be possible to view and validate the decisions being made. Until we run these tests we don't know how we will have to react to what we find. If we discover that data is vanishing all over the place and wrong redactions are happening, this will oblige much greater caution than if everything behaves well. The benchmarking will also be revealing. If we discover that live redaction on a non-loaded API seems to suggest (random figure with no basis used for effect) a whole month of database churning, that might indicate that an offline redaction is much smarter (consider the scope for conflicts or just plain degradation of API performance). But we have to perform the tests first - after that, if we can see that our projections are flawed, we will need to address this. "This can be done without downtime and should be" Two points need to be made about this, and both are hinted at above. Firstly, _if_ we wish to use the opportunity of the licence change to migrate to the new server (and database version), something Matt is keen to do, this will require at least some downtime. A separate discussion must be had about the principle of live redaction V offline redaction (which is assumed to be quicker and avoids certain theoretical issues such as permormance hit and redactions conflicting with real edits). We still lack the benchmarks to make a truly informed decision between the live and offline options. The plan, as many of you have m
