[Talk-GB] Official database of 350, 00 GB bus stops etc and 50, 000 places to be made available!

Chris Morley c.morley at gaseq.co.uk
Tue Dec 23 16:22:50 GMT 2008


Peter Miller wrote:
> The UK Department for Transport, together with Traveline, is offering
> to make available the bulk of the data from their NaPTAN and NPTG data 
> sets to
> the OpenStreetMap project.

Well done Peter Miller, this is very welcome and illustrates the 
importance of OSM having professional supporters with influence as 
well as vision.

But it sounds as if the DfT is conceding the concept of open data is 
rather reluctantly: the transfer process seems to complicate things 
without any useful result.

> For the avoidance of doubt the datasets themselves will remain Crown 
> copyright. The Department
> is however offering a single one-off bulk import to OpenStreetMap under
> the required CCBYSA licence used on OSM.
...
> An import process will be designed by the team and agreed with the
> contact person at the DfT
...
> On completion of the import the source datasets would be deleted.

Couldn't somebody write a script to re-extract the data from planet? 
They would then have the NAPTAN and NPTG data, still with Crown 
Copyright but with a CCBYSA licence, which they could publish. The 
Department of Transport would no longer control of who has use of the 
complete dataset, which presumably is the reason for the complicated 
transfer process. It's a pity that the data wasn't released with fewer 
strings in the first place, but I guess this was as far as the DfT was 
prepared to progress.

Chris




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