[OSM-legal-talk] Advice for transiki

[Mike Dupont]

Hi,
I would suggest that the devil is in the details, please be specific.
my I suggest that you write a wikipeidia article about the agency  or
wikitravel page about the timeplan/schedule and I will review it.
mike

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 3:43 AM, Andrei Klochko
<transportsplan2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello again,
> This time, no weird things. I thinked a little about the whole transit data
> stuff, and I had an idea: if we think of the very minimalistic set of
> things, that someone willing to go to a "lost" place needs to know to
> succeed in planning his trip (I especially think of very lost places, far in
> the countryside), then maybe, the "operating centre" (say, headquarters'
> adress), and at least the welcome page of the website, of "surrounding"
> transit agencies, would still be a good start for that. If, by clicking a
> place, any user could have access to this minimalistic set of data about
> surrounding transit agencies, then at least he would know where to search
> the remaining data he needs to plan his trip. I am thinking here of a trip I
> made to portugal last summer, and about my endless search for a transit
> agency that would cover a specific place, 30km west of Lisbon (West Birre
> and Murches, for those who know), and I found everything about what was just
> 8km east  or further of that point, but nothing closer, no matter how hard I
> searched for it. If only I had known the names of the transit agencies that
> operated on that specific place, or at least around there (but as much of
> them as possible, ideally all of them!) then when searching "their name" +
> if necessary the names of surrounding cities, on google, I might have found
> something. And then, if any data concerning these agencies were available on
> the internet (even by some local people that would have put these timetables
> on a local site, not belonging to the transit agency: this is not our
> problem!), I would have found the reamaining information I needed : plan,
> and timetable, without anybody violating any copyright or database right.
> The problem of transit agencies who do not have a web site is another
> concern, as for that it falls back to the issue of true transit data and the
> necessity of an authorization to reproduce it (if the data about their lines
> isn't available at all on the internet, then without the authorization you
> could link to nowhere, neither could you take pictures and extract anything
> from them to put it on the internet, without proper authorization; and
> unless the positions of the bus stops, acquired by means of a gps, are free
> to use (which, I guess, we still cannot decide for sure), then I think,
> based on what was said earlier, that we can do nothing about this problem
> yet.)
>
> So, I would like to know: is it possible, without asking any permission, to
> put at least one geographical point about a transit agency, on the osm (or
> transiki) map, weither it be the adress of its headquarters or the
> barycentre of their transport network, and, say, the number (amount) of
> their lines?The total amount of lines a company operates, and if possible,
> the average distance each line runs on, would be useful to know in order to
> decide, for example, wether you include a transit agency in a search related
> to one point on the map, or not. It would give a hint about its transport
> network's "radius" of operation, "how far it can reach", more or less. Also,
> you could simply classify transit agencies in different categories: urban,
> interurban, regional, national, if it happens that "average line length" is
> still too much data to be free of use.
>
> And also, is it always possible to link to a website's front page without
> asking permission to the site's owner?
>
> I'm asking here about minimalistic things, I mean, there must at least be
> something  you could systematicly say about all transit agencies, wether
> they agree with it or not, on transiki, and possibly, without any strong
> dependancy to the local country's law...and if the headquarters' adress is
> still not a free piece of data you can add without asking, then find another
> relevant set of coordinates. At least something!
>
> And what about quoting the name itself of the transit agency? Isn't it using
> a trademark on a third party website without authorization of the owner of
> the trademark? I would say no based on the fact that google seems to have
> the authorization to display almost anything about a company when you search
> for it - on google, but still...
>
> Thank you in advance for your help, and sorry if I insist like that on the
> "not asking the authorization" thing: I only believe that it could make the
> gathering of at least some data...much much faster, and the coverage of the
> transiki map, at least in its poorest informative power, could be really
> great much more quickly, if we can achieve it legally. And besides, it would
> need much less effort, than if we always had to negociate with every single
> transit agency, to get any single piece of their data, especially if they
> never answer to anything about these type of questions, for any reason they
> may have...
> Good night
> Andrei
>
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>



-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania
flossk.org flossal.org