[OSM-legal-talk] Licence brief/Use Case - final call forcomments

[Dair Grant]

Jonathan Harley wrote:

>> A bit map would not be a database, but XML, csv, xls, shape files  would.
>> The interesting distinction may be vector data that is not  organized in a
>> direct searchable fashion - so, would svg (for example)  be a database?
>> Hmmmm...
>> 
> Definitely. Searching an SVG or any XML file can be done the same way you
> would search a relational table with no index - by accessing each data item
> and examining it.

Playing devil's advocate, that sounds very much like a bitmap could also be
considered an un-indexed database - it's a table of (x,y,colour) where the
colour is derived from OSM data.

You could argue we use a system very much like this in OSM itself, querying
the oceantiles.dat "database" to make "all water" or "all land" decisions.


-dair
___________________________________________________
dair at refnum.com              http://www.refnum.com/