On 17/07/2015, Colm Moore <[email protected]> wrote: > Adding individual Eircodes shouldn't be a problem. Adding the whole database > is another matter. Facts can't be copyrighted, databases can.
And yet there's little value in mapping just a fraction of the Eircodes. Before starting the job, we need to make sure that we're leagally allowed to finish it. If we can't have all the Eircodes in OSM, we should have none. > So just like I can read the name of an office on a sign and add it to OSM, I > can do the same when I read the Eircode off their business card. My guess is that visually matching Eircode locations with OSM data will be fine. What won't be is adding stand-alone Eircode nodes with at the coordinates given by the Eircode finder, because that's GeoDirectory-tainted. Whether scraping the website is allowed or not is a different question, more about the website's TOS than the database's copyright (assuming a scraper that doesn't directly import the exact coordinates). > On 17 July 2015 11:30:55 GMT+01:00, Simon Poole <[email protected]> wrote: >>What better way to ignore than come to the conclusion that the data >>can't be included in OSM and needs to be removed when it turns up? > > Whatever the merits or de-merits of the system, it is the official post code > system. I map a lot of business. Some of them (gambling, e-cigarettes), I > would prefer not to map, but on OSM I'm a mapper, not an activist. I strive to map impartially too, wether I like the place or not. But postcode are not the same thing, because they're not physical. We always think twice before adding non-physical data to OSM. And in the particular case of Eircode: * It's a list of IDs (useless on its own) created and curated by a private 3rd-party * It has an impressive list of technical flaws which make it a non-starter for many usecases * It's brand-new, and we don't know how much real-world usage it'll get * Mirroring it in OSM is a huge amount of work and a lot of data (which will qualify as bloat if it isn't useful) > If you don't want to add Eircodes, don't. But I think it would be wrong to > delete > Eircodes. I won't map Eircodes (and encourage others not to) because I think it'll be unused bloat, and because I want to promote something better. But of course I'm not going to start an edit war either. As much as I'd like to have "it can't be imported in other databases" as another argument against Eircode, I doubt that it'll be the case (as long as we're carefull to avoid a GeoDirectory taint), so that eicode tags can probably stay in OSM. That said, we don't need the government's blessing to start using a better postcode system. We just need to convince people to start using it, until it reaches critical mass and becomes a de-facto standard. Openpostcode is superior in every way to Eircode (ok, except for the catchy name). If you ever need a postcode, use this one. _______________________________________________ Talk-ie mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ie
