[OSM-legal-talk] Substantial meaning

[Iván Sánchez Ortega]

El Jueves, 23 de Abril de 2009, Frederik Ramm escribió:
> Iván Sánchez Ortega wrote:
> > If the extraction needs an automated tool, then it is substantial.
>
> Uh. This means that even the answer to the question "what is the name of
> the street at lat=12.345 lon=45.789" would be a substantial extract
> because you cannot possibly "peer through the XML"[...]

Nope. To do that, you'll load up your web browser (or your favourite virtual 
globe), center on 12.345,45.678 and look around.

Now, a web browser + openlayers (or Marble, or whatever) is neither a specific 
nor specialized tool to methodically looking for street names near a given 
pair of coordinates. It's a friggin' map.


Now, if you load that data as XML into a GIS, and use some geo-processing to 
define a buffer and then intersect ways with a highway=tag and then extract 
the name= and then output a pretty table, then you're using specialized 
software.


My point is: if a task is tedious enough so that you have to use a GIS, or 
code your own solution, or load the data into a DB to use some SQL magic, 
then the extraction is substantial.

If you can use tools *not* designed for manipulating databases (e.g. a web 
browser with openlayers to look for a street name, a text editor for the XML 
for search an amenity=pub), then the extraction is not substantial.


I believe there is a tipping point in the complexity of a problem in which you 
have to look into specialized software (GIS, CAD, DB admin, custom scripting 
stuff) if you want to solve the problem before dying of old age. IMHO, that 
tipping point is the frontier between substantial and non-substantial.



> > Filtering out all amenity=pub in a
> > small area is not substantial (e.g. all pubs in a 100m x 100m bbox -
> > again, just peer through the XML with *any* text editor and Ctrl+F)
>
> your raw XML processing capabilites seem to vastly exceed mine ;-)

"...there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it, 
though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see 
is blonde, brunette, redhead."

:-D

-- 
----------------------------------
Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivan at sanchezortega.es>

MSN:i_eat_s_p_a_m_for_breakfast at hotmail.com
Jabber:ivansanchez at jabber.org ; ivansanchez at kdetalk.net
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