[OSM-legal-talk] When should ODbL apply to geocoding

[Frederik Ramm]

Randy,

On 09/23/2015 07:18 PM, Randy Meech wrote:
>     3. The database you have created is partly derived from OSM (as far as
>     "this address is at location lon=x, lat=y" is concerned).
> 
> Actually I mis-spoke a bit (sorry, it was several years ago). The
> lat/lngs are actually from state agencies, although I did reverse
> geocoding with Nominatim and store the results in the database.

So you're not using the OSM-derived part for any computation ("which one
is nearest"), but just as an additional display for the user.

In your use case, you could conceivably do the reverse geocoding on the
fly when the user clicks on "view details", rather than do it for all
addresses in advance. Then your database would never contain anything
from OSM.

If your use case were, as I first assumed, that you needed the OSM
coordinates to even offer your service (compute distances), then
on-the-fly would not be an option, technically.

Not that this is particularly relevant in terms of the license but I
think it is an interesting distinction between the two use cases.

> geocoding results seem like
> a produced work to me. I believe that I am decorating other open data
> with the results of a geocoder that contains sufficient art to make it
> not derived, but produced.

Our usual definition of produced work doesn't look at how much art there
is, but whether something is a database. If we did ask "how much art is
there", I'd be tempted to say there's considerably more art in reverse
geocding than there is in forward geocoding.

> Curious about others' thoughts here -- I do think this is an important
> topic to figure out and I'm happy to be a guinea pig for this.

If you came to me with your use case and asked "what would you have me
do to be sure I don't run afoul of the license", I would recommend that
you have two databases or two database tables, one with your POIs and
their coordinates, and another with exactly these coordinates and their
OSM reverse geocoding result, and that you join them when displaying,
and make the OSM result database available under ODbL on request. I
would also tell you that it is very unlikely for anyone to request the
data in the first place.

Bye
Frederik

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