[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed Collective Database Guideline (was Meta-Data Guideline)

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 05 November 2015, Simon Poole wrote:
>
> The text can be found here
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Collective_Database_Guideline

Looks good.  Two observations:

- The second example could possibly use clarification that it applies 
when road classification is solely based on traffic data and not if it 
is a compound rating based on traffic data and OSM road classes.  In 
principle this is clear but emphasizing the boundary between collective 
and derivative here might help.

- You now point out the possibility to use this guideline in combination 
with regional cuts by referring to 'a regional cut'.  This is good but 
reminds me that the regional cuts guideline could use some 
clarification.  Right now it allows an arbitrary number of cuts as long 
as they meet a somewhat fuzzy size criterion.  This is essentially not 
well suited for the declared purpose to avoid cherry-picking.


I still think the blanket permission to selectively replace individual 
attributes with proprietary data is questionable.  It might be 
difficult to exploit this in a way that harms OSM on a larger scale but 
there is a clear risk here IMO.   I admit it is difficult to draw a 
different line that is generally understandable, universally applicable 
and objective.

I especially see this as a problem in areas where 'big data' techniques 
are going to allow more consistent, reliable and up-to-date assessment 
of certain properties for certain applications than manual assessment.  
OSM of course deliberately focusses on manual data acquisition and this 
is something that will always be important but in quite a few areas of 
application i see the difference in practical value between this data 
alone and after supplementing it with automatically acquired data is 
rapidly increasing and the OSM community (and of course also the larger 
open data community) needs to ask itself if it wants to leave this 
whole field to proprietary data providers.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/