OSM started out with the do-it-yourself, clean room approach of on-the-ground surveying. It offers the strongest guarantee of legal compliance and appropriateness for OSM -- no legal analysis required. All of us certainly hold such efforts in the highest esteem, but I do see an argument for letting contributors be resourceful in other ways, to *carefully and judiciously* incorporate other sources, as long as they do their best to document their work.
Thank you, Minh. That really is all I did with rail subdivisions in California. As others have said, I could have asked the rail companies (not by web, which yielded twin brick walls of "gotta log in" and "copyright") perhaps by telephone or letter, in which case I would have likely been given the answers, these being "facts about the world." Or, I could have asked random people on the street, not a good idea, so I didn't. What I did do was to *carefully and judiciously* confirm these data thanks to publications by my employees (the CPUC), and then I well documented that fact in my changeset tags. Easy, peasy: "being resourceful" where it makes sense to do so. And it seems to me, that should be totally fuss-free.
By the way, along with my GPS, a little wire-page note pad with pencil and my decent memory/brain, I certainly do my fair share of on-the-ground surveying, too.
SteveA California _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
