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

[Peter Miller]

On 2 Oct 2009, at 19:17, Dave F. wrote:

> Peter Miller wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> To self check I use:
> http://keepright.ipax.at/report_map.php?db=osm_EU&zoom=14&lat=48.20808&lon=16.37221
>
> Maybe sites like these should be listed in the newbie welcome email?
> Are there others sites like this?
>> 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 believe "to good to be true" is subjective & could lead to  
> penalising
> excellent, accurate mapping by an editor.

If there are roads shown through the middle of houses visible on  
google satelite view on both the data imported into OSM and on another  
source and the roads line up then I would consider it appropriate to  
take a very good look at the reality. If the reality is that a road  
has not replaced a house (or vice-versa) then I is about as good  
evidence as you could get for infringement

>> 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.
>>
> I'm not sure about this, but could comparing/checking not be construed
> as copyright infringement?
> I'm aware it's not straight forward copying, but it uses their data to
> verify OSM's

No it isn't unless you then use what you had learnt to correct the  
data systematically. A 'clean-room' comparison is not infringement.  
Take a look at how Phoenix cracked the IBM Bios with 'clean' and  
'contaminated' engineers and in that case a very good insurance policy  
just in case!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies

I think what we can learn from this is that the people who review  
edits and decide if there is infringement should agree not to make any  
edits to the map in that area, but only report back with a view about  
whether there are similarities which go those resulting from simply  
mapping the same territory, ie when there appear to be similarities in  
features which are unlikely to exist on the ground.


Regards,


Peter


>> 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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