[Talk-us] press from SOTM US

Michal Migurski mike at stamen.com
Mon Oct 22 20:28:13 GMT 2012


On Oct 22, 2012, at 1:12 PM, Alex Barth wrote:

> The data extracted by geocoding should just not lead to a substantial extract of the database, hence not producing a derivative database in the sense of the ODbL. I feel this would be within the spirit of why the ODbL was adopted (to encourage contribution) while clarifying an important use of OSM data that would create a huge incentive to improve data. Right now we largely don't have functioning municipal boundaries in OSM. Obviously, any data that is mixed into OSM data for _powering_ the geocoder would fall under share alike stipulations.

MySociety is working on derived municipal boundaries from OSM data:
	http://global.mapit.mysociety.org/

E.g.:
	http://global.mapit.mysociety.org/area/168844.html

There's data in there, and code out there that you could build on. The MapIt service itself is non-commercial, but the code that drives it is freely-available.
	http://code.mapit.mysociety.org/


> You bring up the important problem of properly bounding the geocoding case. I'm thinking if all that can be extracted from OSM's database are names and addresses for lat/lon pairs or lat/lon pairs for names or addresses, it would be arguably impossible or at least impractically hard to recreate a functioning street network from it and the extracted data would be a narrow subset of OSM no matter how many locations are being geocoded. Thoughts?


This seems to match the spirit of the license as far as I understand it.

-mike.

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michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
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