[Talk-GB] ITO! World Tools

SK53 sk53.osm at gmail.com
Thu Nov 28 13:08:57 UTC 2019


The Ordnance Survey (OSGB) is the national mapping agency, the Open Roads
data set is produced from data which are created as part of their main
mission, so there should be no 3rd party rights. Furthermore, the recent
77m judgement changes this landscape a little from the OSMF statement, in
that explicit statement of which 3rd party has rights and over which parts
of the data is to be expected. In other words if the licence suggests to a
reasonable person that they can use the data, then they can. I might ask
the LWG to update the text.

AFAIK the only OS dataset which may contain third-party data are the
postcodes, and the licence conditions for this were liberalised from their
original form.

OSMF, in the person of Mike Collinson, had extensive discussions with the
Ordnance Survey about licence conditions prior to the ODbL change.
Subsequent OSGB data has tended to be released under pure OGL rather than
the OSGB-specific version which removed some of the problems.

In general, OSM, and specifically the UK community have reasonable links
with OSGB. Their innovation centre hosted a hack weekend
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London_Hack_Weekend_Aug_2015> in 2015
and we variously meet at events like OpenDataCamp, GISrUK, Geomob etc. I
certainly have informal discussions with OS staff which often relate to
what kind of data both organisations collect.

In addition, I'm very familiar with openaddress.co.uk and the reasons why
it didn't carry on. The 3rd party data issue was only part of the story.

Equally, the UK community have always been relatively conservative in using
OSGB and other open data. When the open data were first released roughly
1-2% of street names had errors ranging from being completely wrong to
minor spelling issues: this was one reason why not:name was so important.
If I add names from OSGB data I usually check to see if I can find support
for that name in another open data source (not difficult, we have around
70% coverage of postcodes in open data according to Will Phillips). When OS
Locator came out I visited the locations of the missing names.

Broadly speaking we have a decent awareness of these issues going back a
number of years (see licence discussion at SotM '07). Don't forget that
OSMs genesis was, in part, because of OSGB's onerous licence terms in 2004.
Several early OSMers in the UK were behind the FreethePostcode
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Free_The_Postcode> site.

Regards,

Jerry

On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 at 11:06, Mateusz Konieczny <matkoniecz at tutanota.com>
wrote:

>
>
>
> 28 Nov 2019, 11:30 by jez.nicholson at gmail.com:
>
> As Jerry says, the key feature was that it compared OS road names to OSM
> and highlighted the differences.
>
> Just to check: was it containing any third-party data where
> "the licence explicitly excludes rights in third party data and therefore
> you
> need to take the same steps as you would for CC0 licenced material. "
> would cause it to become unsuitable for OSM use?
>
> See
>
> https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Licence_Compatibility#Open_Government_Licence_.28OGL.29_based_licences
>
> The Microsoft Open Data Team recently analysed
> streets-with-no-name-but-lots-of-houses which threw up positive hits, and
> some potentially false positives of new housing estates which do not have
> road names yet and auxiliary service roads.
>
> StreetComplete would suffer from the same issue, though there is some
> benefit from tagging noname=yes
>
> I'd like to see a new tool be built....
>
> Sounds like something doable, but for me it goes onto a big pile of "nice
> idea, not enough free time"
> for now.
>
> Also, licence issue would need to be confirmed to be not existing (has
> somebody did a review
> who makes this data? Is there even any third party data there?)
>
> i'd also like someone to fund it being built and sustain it either through
> a grant or donated work.
>
>
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>
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