[OSM-legal-talk] Clarifying Geocoding and ODbL

Oliver K osm.abalakov at googlemail.com
Wed Jun 12 00:28:25 UTC 2013


2013/6/7 Alex Barth <alex at mapbox.com>

>
> Over the past months, we've tried to get legal advice on this question.
> This is difficult as the lack of existing case law makes it hard to get
> official legal opinion on the document and the license is very complex. But
> here is what we have heard back informally:
>
> 1. Geocoding can be interpreted as Produced Work per the defintion of
> Produced Work in the ODbL [2].
> 2. The ODbL is too vague in the definition of its terms, requiring
> additional clarifications by licensor. This is most importantly the case
> around the terms "derivative database" and what constitutes a "substantial"
> extraction of data [3].
>
>
> My take on this is the following:

I don't agree with the approach to just add the statement to OSMF wiki
page. What you want to achieve is to establish a Community Norm in order to
eliminate a grey area in the ODbL - a grey area as there is room for
interpretation and a Community Norm as it is intended to limit the room for
interpretations in the sense of the community.

Until now there is no official process to establish a Community Norm as
well as no process to acknowlege a grey area and its priority to work on
it. First we need to establish the process how we create a Community Norm.
This is indeed required in order to serve requests like yours.

In regards to "Geocoding" this needs to be distinguished from name
browsing. I understand Geocoding as the addition of a coordinate to
complete address. A "Geocoder" often works in a way that it looksup
uncomplete addresses and matches the best result or proposes a list of the
best candidates and then completes the uncomplete input to a full and valid
address - this is the name browsing part - often considered as part of the
Geocoder. From this perspective the Geocoder should be defined first.

In regards to adding a coordinate to an address: if you add a coordinate to
single address or even a list of addresses then the results remain
"unlinked" from the original database - unlinked in the the sense that if
you change the underlying database the geocoding results (coordinates) will
remain the same - the address is just projected on the orginial database.
You would need to "re-geocode" the address in order to adjust the geocoding
results.

Considering the OSM database and your list of addresses as a combination of
two different independent databases - a collective database. Then even
after geocoding the two databases would remain indepedent from each other
as they are not "linked" to eachother. From this perspective there is not
even a grey area.

The namebrowsing part is more complicated as you might create a substantial
extract from the OSM database - here the defintion of "substiantial
extract" is key.

Best regards,
Oliver
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