[OSM-legal-talk] Proposed "Metadata"-Guideline

[Tom Lee]

Frederik. I think it's a bit ungenerous to suggest that getting open
address data into OSM constitutes "hijacking" the project. This kind of
data is obviously useful to many people. It's also obviously relevant to
OSM, as the project already contains and even renders it in its base style.
And of course Mapbox has paid mappers who help to maintain and improve the
data we rely upon. I'm not sure why there's a presumption that we're hoping
to "free ride."

OpenStreetMap is the premiere open geodata project, and the logical hub for
new open geodata initiatives. The world will be a better place if it
continues to grow and support more needs and ideas. That's the beauty of an
open project. After all, if you are happy with the dataset as it is,
downloading a snapshot is easily done.

Martin: Italy is a very interesting case for open address data. Apologies
if you already know this, but: open data exists for census tract
geometries; and for address strings joined to the census tract ID. What
remains to be done is assigning the address strings in each tract to
rooftops. This is obviously an enormous task, but it's a great example of
why address data (and geocoding) belongs in OSM: the iD editor, paired with
a microtasking tool and open imagery, would be a great way to put those
points in their correct locations.


On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 10/13/2015 06:12 PM, Tom Lee wrote:
> > Obviously, not all of those 200M points belong in OSM. But many of them
> > do. OpenAddresses does not have the toolchain or community needed to
> > improve and maintain that data.
>
> ...
>
> > I want to do that work once in OSM, not a hundred times in a hundred
> > different closed geo databases.
>
> Suggest to do it once (not a hundred times) and open (not closed) but
> without hijacking OSM community for it. Build a community that is as
> interested in addresses as you are and have them maintain the database.
>
> My guess is that while the address data set is more valuable to (large,
> commercial) users, it will attract less contribution from (private,
> unpaid) mappers, and will therefore require more constant paid work than
> OSM does.
>
> Anyone trying to get OSM to ingest the existing open address data of
> this world and then even maintain and improve it is hoping for a free
> ride on the back of mappers who'd rather do other stuff and who in many
> areas are already thin enough on the ground. Whoever wants us to add 200
> million addresses, should also add to our community the people needed to
> do the maintenance on them.
>
> Yes there are addresses in OSM at the moment, but these are *mainly*
> created by people where no open data exists, in the same spirit that was
> guiding OSM when it started: "They won't give it to us, so we'll make
> our own." - frankly, if there was a halfway usable repository of open
> addresses that could be merged with OSM for those who want it, and if
> open addresses become available for regions where OSM already has
> addresses, I'd not be opposed to dropping the addresses from OSM in
> those regions.
>
> tl;dr addresses are valuable to have but just because OSM already exists
> doesn't mean it is the natural receptacle.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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