[Imports] EEA:Nationally designated areas import

[Jan Kučera]

Hi,

> limits, and we're likely to reach them quickly. The basic question remains
> the same: Is it part of our mission to collect and re-distribute free data
> that we're not the owner of?

osmfoundation.org says:
- OpenStreetMap is an initiative to create and provide free geographic
data, such as street maps, to anyone
- It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and
distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data
for anyone to use and share.

So ihmo yes, we import free data and build upon it, derive it (for
instance my imports had trouble with name encoding and most of names
are already corrected in OSM by others since import). The question is
how much derivation can occur over such a dataset.

I can see the foundation remains rather quiet about its funding... in
case it needs more money to function (and possibly grow according to
community needs?) I think a fundraiser is an answer rather than
limiting peoples participation...

For instance, in Wikimedia I think they do not speek about technical
resources at all (server, bandwidth) and I think there are not any
serisous problems around these... in comparison to OSM, where I always
hear something like "this is a feature, not a bug, in order to prevent
collapsing of our servers" (was an answer to non-functioning rendering
of big relations)... seems to me this attitude is quite not the best
and definitely does not ignite participation...

2012/7/30 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> Hi,
>
>
> On 07/30/2012 12:16 PM, Jaak Laineste wrote:
>>
>> Technical proposal: what about setting up a shared GIS server
>> somewhere next to Mapnik renderer, so it would provide both usable
>> CMS and hosting for this kind of datasets? So community can upload
>> their shapefiles with metadata there, Mapnik can use them and other
>> community renderers can download and use them too if they need to.
>> Technically there are already some shapefile-based datasets in mapnik
>> renderer (coastlines hosted in SVN); what is missing is a scalable
>> interface to add other external datasets.
>
>
> There are a number of organisations attempting the same already. For
> example, the "WeoGeo marketplace" hosts many free shapefiles, and so does a
> github repository run by Development Seed/Mapbox (who want to make it easy
> for TileMill users to access shapefiles). Even ESRI is in that game.
>
>
>> There are several opensource GIS server packages which could be good
>> fit, Geoserver seems to be closest to me. Sure, it has a lot of GIS
>> stuff we don't really need right away, and may miss some features,
>> but it seems to have good base to get started with it.
>
>
> But don't kid yourself - the amount of free datasets around is huge and will
> easily use up any capacity we can build up. I would of course much prefer
> such a solution to everybody dumping their stuff into OSM because then it is
> easier to access (many people behind imports to OSM don't even want to
> bother setting up their own renderer - they believe that once stuff is in
> OSM, we'll conventiently render it for them). But even this approach has its
> limits, and we're likely to reach them quickly. The basic question remains
> the same: Is it part of our mission to collect and re-distribute free data
> that we're not the owner of?
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"