[OSM-legal-talk] Size of NearMap Contribution

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    to give some perspective to the debate about whether or not existing 
NearMap-derived objects will have to be deleted, I have summed up the 
number of edits in all changesets that said anything about NearMap in 
any tag (comment, source, etc).

I arrived at a sum of 1,057,549, slightly over 1 million. The total 
number of objects in Australia is 10,234,567. That means that roughly 
10% of data in Australia might be affected by NearMap.

At the same time, the total number of objects in OSM is roughly 800 
million, so Australia makes up for only 1.25% of OSM data (NB: not to be 
confused with mailing list volume, of which Australia has something like 
10%). Only 0.125% of OSM data worldwide is affected by NearMap.

That obviously explains why NearMap is very important to the community 
in Australia. But for the project as a whole, one million objects is 
really not something we should make a big fuss about. For example, we 
had a time-limited "loan" of aerial imagery for a small region here in 
Germany last year 
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Luftbilder_aus_Bayern), and the 
community traced ~ 2 million objects within 3 months *in addition* to 
normal mapping going on everywhere in Germany. After the Haiti 
earthquake, 1 million objects were traced by 300 people in two weeks.

My statistics are of course flawed - they do not capture objects 
individually tagged source=nearmap rather than on the changeset, and if 
an object has been modified more than once in a "nearmap" changeset, it 
has been counted twice. Also, I counted ALL objects for any changeset 
that said something with nearmap, so if someone put "comment=tons of 
POIs from GPS plus one road from nearmap" that counts them all. And 
probably lots of other errors.

I'm posting this to legal-talk because even though this posting does not 
deal with anything legal, I have a hunch that follow-ups will.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"