The story of the Ottawa bus stops started when the City decided to
announce the bus stops in an automated way to assist blind people. To do
this they went round every bus stop with very accurate GPS equipment so
the bus stops were measured to within a meter or so accuracy. One or two
weren’t in quite the right place, being placed in the highway but on the
whole they were much better than they had been.
Some GTFS files for bus stop positions can be 200 meters out.
I bumped into the head of the transit system and talked about the
License on the data and his comment was “but we want you to use the data.”
So now we had accurate bus stop data that we couldn’t use because of
licensing. Bus stop data in OpenStreetMap in Ottawa is important because
the transit route planning system at the time did not use footpaths and
would suggest a longer trip to a different bus stop than the closet one.
The Canadian Treasury Board was promoting Open Data and the President of
the Treasury Board wanted to show how progressive they were so had a
meeting of a dozen or so people who were thought to use Open Data. I was
one of them and raised the issue that we couldn’t use their data because
of the license which surprised a few civil servants who were there.
It took them five years to consult and eventually come up with version
2.0 of the Open Government Licence – Canada which is the current Open
Data License.
Statistics Canada sells a lot of data. Want to know where the best place
to open a new coffee shop is Stats Canada will sell you all sorts of
data to show you were the best places are. They were interested in
enriching their data about buildings. How many floors they had etc. and
had the idea that using OpenStreetMap volunteers would be an inexpensive
way to enrich their data. Before I retired I worked at Statistics Canada
and the corporate culture is very different to OpenStreetMap.
We had a meeting which included the City of Ottawa, a couple of people
from the local University, at least one person from HOT by phone and
someone from Metrolinx who had added some addresses from Statistics
Canada’s OpenData portal after examining their Open Data license and the
requirements of OSM. They were new houses and they wanted them for their
transit planner. Statistics Canada Open Data is released under the
Federal government’s Open Data license by the way.
We showed them Ottawa in OSMand in French with French street names,
politically French is important in Canada and can add expense to a
project if you need to translate etc. The decision in principle was made
to import City of Ottawa’s building data into OSM and then enrich it.
It took two years to change the City’s Open Data license to be the same
as the Federal Government one. There are minor wording changes such as
City of Ottawa rather than the Crown but basically it’s the same.
During that time I suggested to Statistics Canada someone attending SotM
in Europe might be useful to make a few contacts. In the event the
person who was suppose to go was unable to attend was unable to attend
so his manager went instead.
So everything was lined up ready for the import. Both the City of Ottawa
and Statistics Canada had put a lot of effort into the project and many
organisations were looking forward to using the data. Metrolinx had
studied the licensing and were happy we were OK.
The license was challenged on the import mailing list. Shall we simply
say the LWG was very nice and came up with a verdict that accepted
Version 2 of the Open Data license. We’ll pass over all the people
involved but simply say it took considerable effort and resources.
These days data from most Canadian municipalities released under their
Open Data license is not eligible for OSM but the same data released
through the Statistics Canada Open Data is eligible.
The bus stops, well once the Open Data licenses had been sorted out the
local mappers imported the data.
Any change to the license requirements to import Open Data can have an
impact and that is a concern. It takes a long time to get things changed
to line up.
Cheerio John
Dave F via talk wrote on 11/29/2022 10:38 AM:
On 28/11/2022 23:48, Tobias Knerr wrote:
we would like to offer data donors a standard legal text that they
can use to make their data available to OSM in such a way that we
would expect it to survive a hypothetical license change.
I'm confused.
If a maintainer of a database wishes to change their licence, they're
certain to have justifiable reasons for doing so. If it means OSM
can't use it, so be it. OSM has no jurisdiction.
If it's a licence change by OSM then how can a maintainer of a
database possibly account for a future, unspecified change who's
implementation was out of their control?
Could you expand on what you mean by 'legal text'. Is it a legally
binding contract?
Cheers
DaveF
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