[Talk-us] Community Involvement

[Toby Murray]

My thoughts about OSM US:

I don't know if you will have resources for this but it would be nice
to have some legally authoritative information when dealing with
potential government data sources. Since copyright laws vary by
country this seems like a good thing for a national chapter to deal
with.

Maybe even at the state level. I found out (by asking) that the Kansas
DoT considers all the maps on their website to be in the public domain
so they are all usable in OSM. Is this the case in other states? I'm
not suggesting that OSM US start trying to contact state government
divisions in all 50 states but perhaps there could be some suggestions
on how to initiate contact with a government agency.  What about the
impact of the Santa Clara county lawsuit back in 2009? Are there any
parts of that decision that could be used as a precedent in other
jurisdictions? My county is pretty awesome in that they gave me
permission to use their 6" aerial imagery for tracing but when I asked
the county next door, I was told that they charge for all their GIS
data, end of story.

I know the first request I sent to my county GIS department was
completely inadequate since I didn't really understand all the
licensing issues yet. (not that I do now either...) So maybe just some
notes or even form letters that hit on the important US specific
copyright/license issues that need to be conveyed to potential data
sources. Also, I see a wiki page about the UK version of FOIA but
nothing about the US version. Although I do seem to recall something
about FOIA not really being that useful for OSM...


Also, concerning some of the comments on tagging in this thread:

It is great that we can use any tags we want. But at the same time,
some consistency is absolutely necessary to be able to actually use
the data in a global environment. Why do we all use highway=* tags for
roads? That wouldn't be my first impulse, for most city roads at
least, but we do it for consistency.

In my day job, data inconsistencies almost always point to a problem
that needs to be fixed so I will admit that I am biased towards
stricter guidelines. However also as a new mapper I have found it
difficult to figure out how to map some relatively simple things
"correctly." Sometimes there is nothing but a stub page on the wiki,
sometimes there are 2 or 3 competing proposals, all of which have been
idle for over a year. Several times this has led me to just "tag for
the renderer" since that was the most authoritative source available.
I have seen the same thing happening with other new mappers.

I firmly believe that a lot of the time "people use different tags as
they see fit and that's the way it should be" should really be "people
use different tags because they weren't able to easily figure out how
other people have tagged this feature." Coming up with a set of
guidelines would be much more appreciated and less looked upon as
"restricting" as some people seem to think. Look at the discussion
happening in the mapquest thread about state highways. No one is
saying "IT SHOULD BE DONE THIS WAY!" but rather "it would be nice to
have consensus"

Yes, there is tagstat but that isn't exactly the most user friendly
thing either at least until you have a couple weeks of working with
OSM data under your belt.



Toby