[OSM-legal-talk] maps.me hotel data (again)

[Stewart C. Russell]

Hi -

I followed last month's discussion* from afar with interest. I hope I'm
not flogging an utterly dead horse here, but I made a few discoveries in
comparing local maps.me data around Toronto with OSM nodes:

1) Initially, maps.me was removing obviously identical hotel nodes (same
name, very close location), and replacing them with booking.com data.
Non-matching OSM nodes were left, so if a mapper had put a typo in the
name or tagged a different building in a hotel complex, maps.me showed
both. This scenario is clearly not allowed by the OSMF guidelines.

2) Now it seems that *all* OSM hotel nodes are included, along with
(some? all?) booking.com hotel properties. The booking.com nodes have a
slightly higher profile, but they appear mixed together in search results.

3) The skipped nodes list (formerly at
http://direct.mapswithme.com/direct/latest/skipped_nodes.lst) is now no
longer published. The last version I reviewed (from 2016-07-31) was very
clearly close matches to booking.com's database. In a way, since it was
compared against a proprietary database, the skipped nodes list was
derived from booking.com's data. I'm not sure booking.com would be happy
about this use of their data.

It would seem that the guidelines would only allow the mixing of a
booking.com proprietary horizontal layer, paraphrasing mechanically from
“restaurant” to “[hotel]”:

    You use OpenStreetMap as a base topographical
    map and make your best reasonable efforts to
    exclude ALL [hotel]s. You then add a layer of
    your own [hotel] data.

I'm not seeing this in the maps.me app.

cheers,
 Stewart

*: starting here:
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/legal-talk/2016-July/008468.html