On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 12:42:26PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote: > On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 12:18:30PM +0000, Nick Black wrote: > > Is there someone from Oxford University who can shed some light on the > > real reason for the decision to/not to use OSM? I've tried to get in > > touch via the website, but got directed to an external company who > > haven't replied. > > I've forwarded your question onto the team here in OUCS responsible for > OXPOINTS (who also have some advisory role in the Oxford website, though > don't get to make decisions) to see if they can shed any extra light.
Here is their response: ---Begin quotation--- You really have to ask [Public Affairs Directorate] to explain the policies for www.ox.ac.uk. It is not up to us. The reason (I understand) they removed OSM for maps of where colleges are is that the data was wrong - the database of the lat/long or postcode or whatever for each college was not right. Where that data came from I have no idea. OUCS' involvement is that we have a display-agnostic database (a TEI XML file) of university buildings (containing more than just location). We have written conversions from that to KML and to GMaps API. We'd have a go at displaying it using OSM if someone wanted to pay us to do it, of course; or others are very welcome to write TEI to whatever-OSM-wants transformations. But I stress again that the display of maps on www.ox.ac.uk is entirely down to the Public Affairs Department in Admin and their contractor Torchbox. The statement that "two members of OUCS staff had invested time in the OXPOINTS project and wanted to put it to use" is misleading; it is true that we want our data used, because it is better than anything else available; but we have no particular axe to grind over whether it is OSM or Google Maps or Microsoft Live used to draw a map. ---End quotation--- Dominic. -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email) _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk-gb
