[Legal-general] Introduction

[Eric Wolf]

Landon,

Thanks for your input. If you don't mind, I may quote you in future
presentations (about your willingness to upload to USGS first).

The USGS is actively exploring options like this. We are putting together a
separate instance of the OSM stack in hopes that it may become the channel
for The National Map Corps to provide data. We are actually starting by
exploring using the OSM stack to support data interchange between the USGS
and state and local governments.

But my intent of posting here about PD was that working on something
separate from OSM is less than ideal. Getting the USGS or OSM to change
their license models to be compatible would be ideal.

-Eric

-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
Eric B. Wolf                    New! 720-334-7734
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography

GPG Public Key: http://www.h4h.net/ebwolf.public.key.txt


On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Sunburned Surveyor <
sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com> wrote:

> I meant to send the message below to the mailing list, not just to Eric.
>
> Eric wrote: "This is how it works now. Because of the license, OSM is
> able to "pull" data from the USGS at will. There is no incentive to
> "push" data upstream because we cannot get anything back. Money (tax
> dollars) spent developing any "push" would be very contentious -
> almost as bad as if the USGS were to spend money pushing data to
> Google or TeleAtlas."
>
>
> I think we may be looking at this backwards. Let me explain.
>
> Right now, I don't give any of my volunteer geospatial data to the
> USGS because there isn't a good mechanism to do so. I just upload my
> stuff to OSM. That means (at this point in time) the USGS is getting
> none of my stuff and relatively no benefit from OSM.
>
> If, instead, the USGS set up a mechanism where I could give them my
> volunteer geospatial data, after which it was uploaded to OSM, the
> USGS is getting my stuff, and OSM gets it too. The reason it has to go
> to the USGS first is to avoid "license contamination" by OSM. But at
> the end of the day the USGS gets the data they aren't getting now.
> Instead of getting it from OSM they get it from the mappers directly.
>
> That may not be as easy as getting a data dump directly from the OSM
> database, but I think this method of getting data into the USGS
> directly from the mapper instead of from OSM can be turned into a
> benefit. The USGS will be more interested in quality control and
> metadata than most OSM folks, and it will be able to implement some
> more oversight/quality control measures if it chooses to. I know OSM
> has a "free spirit", but I think a lot of folks like myself wouldn't
> mind going through a couple extra checks when we contribute data. This
> is sort of how the National Map Corps worked.
>
> At the end of the day the USGS would have a repository with a good
> percentage of the data present in OSM, only it would be of better
> quality.
>
> The USGS doesn't even have to push up to OSM if it doesn't want to.
> Someone at OSM could suck up the data from the USGS repository.
>
> I'd start uploading data to a PD repository administered by the USGS
> tomorrow. It is going to take a lot longer than that to effect any
> license change in OSM, if that is even possible.
>
> Take your lemons and make lemonade. :]
>
> Landon
>
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