Hi, (I'm hijacking this thread which Nic started about legalities of imports on legal-talk, and moving over to talk)
Nic Roets wrote: > My suggestion is that we should have a fixed, but simple procedure for > users who import data: I think that every import should start with a deliberation on whether to import *at all*. Currently, I have the impression that many people are very trigger-happy when it comes to importing data. I believe that is running the risk of making OSM into one giant data rubbish dump. The old-style GIS community is currently working on several projects that collect what they call "metadata" - basically, because they know that there are so many different people with so many different data sets, they are working on ways to describe these datasets in a way that hopefully enables intelligent clients to present data retrieved from all of them as one coherent data set. This is of course extremely difficult and introduces many problems that one does not have when using just one huge database instead of thousands of different databases. But since many datasets are not static, you cannot simply grab them and pour them into one large database and be happy. What does this mean for our data imports? Data that is externally "owned" and maintained should not be imported, with the following exceptions: * if the data is so important for us (usu. as the foundation for other crowdsourced stuff) that we'd rather have and outdated version of it in OSM than nothing at all; * if we are confident that we, the OSM community, will do a better, more reliable, more thorough, and more timely job in updating the information than the original owner (this includes cases where the original owner has ceased maintenance); * if he are confident that we can easily synchronize our database with any updates made by the original owner to his data set. In all other cases it would be *much* more desirable to establish better mechanisms of merging OSM data with that other data in preparation for map drawing etc., rather than pulling it all in and having it rot. I would very much like to develop a kind of "litmus test" for imports, and get the message across that not every import is a good import (even if legally spotless). Today, even newcomers to OSM sometimes seem hell-bent on importing large quantities of data just because they can. I would like to remind people that OSM has a very lively culture of surveying data - and I'd rather have 1 sq km surveyed by a newbie than 100 sq km imported. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
