[josm-dev] Bing imagery
Richard Fairhurst
richard at systemeD.net
Tue Nov 30 18:31:17 GMT 2010
Hello all,
== JOSM users: please read ==
Your developers are great people and I'm sure they will be making the
imagery live when they humanly get a moment, no doubt within the next
day or so. Please have faith in them and stop bugging them. And me.
== JOSM developers: please read ==
Bing imagery is now live in Potlatch 2. Just because I've been asked
about this five times already in the last 10 minutes by eager JOSM
developers, here's some basics for you. Bear in mind that I don't have
any official role with anyone except as P2 pointman, which simply means
people have told me stuff.
You are allowed to display Bing tiles for tracing _BUT_
a) You must display a Bing logo, hyperlinked to Bing maps
b) You must display the credits for the imagery providers relevant to
the current viewport
c) You must display a link to the terms of use
The difficult bit is b), and you may find out the imagery providers by
one of two ways:
i) Look at the headers served with the tile; match them up against a
list of copyright strings provided by Bing. (I can't give you that list.
Maybe Bing can.)
ii) Use the Bing API provided for that purpose. I call
http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Imagery/Metadata/Aerial/0,0?zl=1&mapVersion=v1&key=[potlatch's_bing_maps_key]&include=ImageryProviders&output=xml
and that gives me everything. You can get a Bing maps key from
www.bingmapsportal.com. I'd suggest you get one for JOSM.
Feel free to use Potlatch 2 as a reference implementation for this. Most
of the code is in
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/changeset/24461/applications/editors/potlatch2
(and a few little layout tweaks subsequently).
The Bing ToUs are a little awkwardly written in places. I'm going to be
talking to their lawyer guy but two things you might query:
- "online editor" does not exclude JOSM. I've had this confirmed by a
guy at Microsoft, they're using it in the sense of "edits an online
resource" rather than "an app hosted only on a website"
- "non-commercial editor" means, AIUI (haven't confirmed this), they
don't want it in saleable products like the ArcGIS extension. This might
mean that your Bing config string has to sit in a non-GPLed file.
Alternatively you could read "non-commercial editor" as "source code
must always be available for a charge no more than your cost of
physically performing source distribution", i.e. it's ok as long as
you're not _only_ selling it (this would accord with a definition
elsewhere in the ToU). I honestly don't know. I'll see if I can get this
clarified.
I believe Ian Dees is working on all of this so you shouldn't actually
have to bother with anything yourself. But JOSM people keep asking me
about it, so, well, here you go.
cheers
Richard
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