[OSM-legal-talk] Updated geocoding community guideline proposal

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 07/17/2014 01:25 AM, Kai Krueger wrote:
> For forward geocoding, the picture gets a bit more murky though, as the
> distinction between what is for human consumption and what is data, and thus
> a derived database, is much less clear cut.

Indeed. If we were only talking about the "enter your address here and
we'll zoom the map to your location" use case, we'd never be creating
any database that contains OSM data in the first place.

> However, once you start manipulating and computing with those lat/lon
> values. E.g. to calculate the average distance between all of the POIs in
> your proprietary db,

I guess the most commercially interesting use case is: "I have a bunch
of POIs or properties or client addresses and I want to be able to
compute, at any time, for a given lat/lon, which of these are in the
vicinity". The archetypal "where's the nearest pizza place" application
comes to mind. This requires augmenting my proprietary database with
lat/lons from OSM, else I would have to on-the-fly geocode half my
database every time I want to make a query which would be too expensive.

In your own distinction of "is this for human consumption or for a
computer's", it is clearly for a computer's - since the coordinates form
the basis for filtering which items to display to the user. A human
wouldn't be able to sift through the list so quickly.

Bye
Frederik

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