[OSM-legal-talk] Geonames data (was: [OSM-talk] GSoC applications are in! MENTORS wanted)

[Hakan Tandogan]

On Tue, April 8, 2008 13:07, Nick Black wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Sebastian Spaeth <Sebastian at sspaeth.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Hakan Tandogan wrote:
>>
>>> I am an self-employed Computer Scientist with lots of experience in
>>> databases and web applications. I live and work in Germany.
>>
>> Hi Hakan (I can probably talk in German with you :-))
>>
>>
>> thanks for volunteering, I have accepted you as a mentor. You can now
>> click on any proposal you like and say that you are willing to mentor a
>>  proposal (such as the geonames one). I can't enter info like this
>> myself. Google seems rather strict with this.
>>
>> Honestly, I was wondering about the Geonames project application. I am
>> not sure (from a license point of view) that we can import Geonames data,
>> as they also require attribution.
>
> And because they derive from Google Maps, more importantly.

They derive *some* data from GM. Not all of it.

There is interesting information like elevation and population of places,
"is_in" information (geotree) or alternate names in local languages that
are not derived from GM (last time I looked, GM had no Japanese, Russian
or Hebrew spellings of the name "Antalya").

We might synchronize those bits of data, or just add a link to the
geonames webservice so that one doesn't determine the information that OSM
node 36243693 corresponds to geonames place 323777 over and over again.


Regards,
Hakan

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