On 08/06/11 08:15, Peter Miller wrote:
My experience is that the LWG never makes definitive statements!
I find that annoying sometimes but, if we are to follow to Spinoza's
example that we should "made a ceaseless effort not to [...] scorn human
actions, but to understand them", LWG have to deal with legal advice
that is also not definitive. Hopefully they can offer a definitive
position on matters such as good mapping practice - like if we should
import data of uncertain compatibility.
I suggest that you turn the tables on them and send them an email
saying that you will import the OGL-licensed data in xx days unless
you get a statement from them in the mean time saying that it would be
violating the OSM licensing terms and compromising your status as a
contributor.
I have set one or two deadlines on LWG in the past but it doesn't fit
with their working pattern. Until now, nothing gets decided, or is put
to discussion leading up to a decision, in any forum other than the
teleconference. But to their credit, they are quite open and
understanding when you do phone in and discuss matters. This is
something I want to work on: to have a medium-long term discussion with
LWG outside the weekly teleconference. I think the suggestion was met
with a mixed response - discussions will continue. In the modern world
with email, wikis, face to face, etc, there is more to life than
teleconferences!
Regarding data formats. Can I suggest that that we gratefully accept
data in whatever format it is provided. We can ask politely for it to
be in an better format but please don't complain either about the
quality of the data or the suitability of the format which may support
councils who will argue that they should delay releasing anything
until they have got it right and in the perfect format. The phrase is
'raw data now' (warts and all).
Agreed. If the data is even slightly usable, someone in the community
can convert it.
I am currently working on a legally gray dataset (which I am not
importing, obviously) which is currently a mixture of closed data and
data that a government agency aspires to make open data. They seem to
lack the urgency or resources to separate the two, so I am doing it for
them (without them asking) and I will ask nicely if they will release
"my" data subset (for which they have the copyright).
On a separate note. Would you be able to do a comparison between place
names in NatGaz and in OSM. I think we will be surprised how many
places we are still missing from OSM. My guess is that OSM only
contains about 65% of the 50K places in that database. Here it is:
http://data.gov.uk/dataset/nptg
That is an interesting data set. I might use a different approach
because it seems unlikely the original data contains significant
errors(?). Currently, I use XAPI to query OSM for objects near to a
record in the government database. I am not sure if the admins would
appreciate me hammering the XAPI server with 50K requests! or that might
be fine... I could use the UK dump, "slice" it to get place=*, import it
into a separate microcosm server on my laptop, and then do XAPI requests
to my laptop server. I will have a think.
Regards,
Tim
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