[Moderation] Revert request - Russia, Irkutsk - Evgeny Mandrikov

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Fri Oct 2 13:50:44 BST 2009


On 2 Oct 2009, at 13:25, Aleksandr Dezhin wrote:

> 2009/10/2 John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/10/2 Aleksandr Dezhin <a.dezhin at gmail.com>:
>>> I asked Eugene, that was the source of these data, to which he  
>>> replied
>>> to me that this is the map drawn on the work of GPS tracks. However,
>>> the main streets are not placed on tracks uploaded to OSM.
>>
>> This in itself isn't conclusive that he didn't use GPS data, I  
>> haven't
>> uploaded most of my GPS tracks either as there is no easy way to
>> remove where I live on hundreds of GPS tracks.
>>
>> I have also received GPS tracks from grey nomads, retired people that
>> go travelling north for the winter, they don't want people to know
>> about their favourite camping/fishing spots for example.
>
> Maybe you're right. Of course he could use GPS data in a different
> datum or something else. But this is not the main problem. The main
> problem in my opinion that this was a very bad import, which seems to
> me, does not meet high quality standards of OSM.
>
> As for the rest we can debate forever) If you want, then I propose to
> continue this thread in talk at openstreetmap.org. Initially, I sent this
> post there, but received no replies.

This list is about two issues really, one is developing the required  
technical tools to be able to spot and deal with vandalism and  
mistakes and determine if something is vandalism or what. The other is  
to sort out the social protocols to deal with issues that come up, so  
lets use this case as test case!

There is firstly an issue about the import being badly done, then  
there is a possible copyright violation.

With regard to the first I guess we could have tools that monitor the  
minutely feed and spot possible dodgy data coming in, such as area  
features that are not areas. We might wish to ignore them if there are  
only a few, or possible come in with a 'mentoring' hat on and help the  
person, or with some fix-up tools to correct the errors, or we may  
decide to reverse out the changeset and talk about it with the  
contributor before they try again. All of the above will be  
appropriate at times. Clearly we don't have the in place now.

Then there is the issue of potential copyright violation. The best way  
I can think of to do that is to overlay the data on TeleAtlas data,  
Navteq data and any other official data sources you can think of and  
see if the fit is to good to be true. I have just used OSM Mapper [1]  
to create a KML file [2] for the place and compared it with Google map  
data and with the aerial photograph.

 From this I can see that a) Google does not have mapping for the town  
and the water outlines on Google are way off, b) the mapping matches  
the satelite photography reasonably well but there are significant  
inconsistences (ie it is not perfect) and c) there are lots of poor  
joins in the data.  Take a look yourself.

Given the inconsistencies with reality it would be easy to spot  
copyright violation if this is what it is. If any of copyright sources  
have the same errors then it is reasonable to say that it is ripped  
off, but I don't get that impression so far. It would of course be  
interesting to know where it did come from.

Let's bottom out the possible copyright issue and then consider how to  
fix the data up if is passes.


[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Mapper
[2] http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/685499/Irkutsk_highways.kml


Regards,


Peter



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