[Talk-ca] Road name edits in Canada

[Jarek Piórkowski]

Hello Andy,

Regarding the licences themselves:

Recent Statistics Canada data appears to be released under a
"Statistics Canada Open Licence" which can be found at
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/reference/licence. As far as I know this
has not been approved for importing to OSM. I do not know whether the
editor's activities would be considered an "import" or if the licence
is compatible for non-import use. The OSM wiki at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada#Importing_government_data
does say "Statistics Canada data is used to import street names where
they are missing from the other data sets. It is advised to not copy
the geometry; however, you can use the street names database as a
reference. " - I did not go through the page history to find when and
by whom this was added.

The "Open Government Licence – Winnipeg" is, to my understanding, not
a suitable OSM import data license. This is a long-standing problem
with Canadian open data where licences with the government unit's name
in their name (here "Winnipeg") are considered by OSM a different
licence from the Open Government Licence even if all the words other
than the city name are the same. As far as I know only the Ottawa
community has gone through the (rather slow) process of getting
OGL-Ottawa approved as an OSM import licence. Same question about
whether the edits constitute an "import" applies.

--Jarek

On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 at 16:53, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello talk-ca people,
>
> Andy from the Data Working Group here.
>
> A new prolific mapper has recently popped up, adding road names in
> Canada and elsewhere.  It has been suggested to the DWG that many of the
> names used were just copied from sources that aren't licence-compatible
> with OSM, such as Google Maps.  Some responses to questions about map
> sources have been somewhat evasive (see e.g.
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/119735027 ) but they now claim
> to be using sources such as:
>
> "City of Winnipeg Open Data Portal - Contains information licensed under
> the Open Government Licence – Winnipeg."
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/734204653
>
> and
>
> "Statistics Canada Road Network File (RNF)"
>
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/507685150
>
> (see https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/119761959 for more)
>
> Do these sources check out as reasonable, and licence-compatible with
> OSM?  Also (and actually more important) are the latest edits by this
> user backed up by those sources?
>
> Normally of course OSM mappers have considerable freedom to map as they
> wish - we take a lot on trust, and don't check that every edit that was
> allegedly derived from a compatible imagery source actually was and
> wasn't from a non-compatible source instead. Unfortunately, in the case
> of this mapper (see previous interactions at e.g.
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PopeyePopcord/blocks and
> https://openstreetmap.org/changeset/119735027 ) I think we need to have
> a soupçon of skepticism.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Andy
>
>
>
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