[Openstreetmap] money and what to do about it

[Jo Walsh]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 11:51:02PM +0000, SteveC wrote:
> Of course, its your money to do with as you like but the project manager
> inside me (there's one in everyone!) would ask questions, like:

i wouldn't think of it as being 'our' money. it is potential money
that saul, schuyler and i have been agentsin encouraging to exist.
a bit is pledges from people and list members, and i certainly
wouldn't want to proceed without gathering and acting on opinion and
consensus on this list as to the maximum benefit possible.
  
> Is there a proof of concept to actually use the data? (I havn't seen one
> (yet!) that anywhere near approaches taking an image and getting vectors
> out, even one where people can draw on top of the image).

i have done a very simple unfinished proof-of-concept with mapserver
http://uo.space.frot.org/freemap/draw.cgi
it is no great shakes, and the drawing is a little inexact but the
idea is there. i had to stop working on it and do remumerating things,
but these are also thankfully mapserver related so i would aspire to
have something more "real" like this, where you can construct lines
and polygons and annotate them with types and properties and so on...

> Have the image license(s) been cleared by a real IP lawyer (eg,
> anti-competitive clauses, reuse, resale, redistribution or any other
> thing more subtle than 'you can make derivative works'). (I once sued
> some people for copyright infringment and its amazing what IP lawyers
> can do!)

okay, perhaps we can find a friendly lawyer to do this pro bono? 

> Is it cheaper to hire a easyrentacar.com + petrol for a sunday and drive
> around a similar sized area, and get street data and point of interest
> data too? (My guess would be yes, but I don't know specific area of
> imagery).

When we speak of this i am reminded of hugh's recent post:
http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2005-February/000265.html

Yes, we should really really acquire a small data sample to try out
feature extraction from. I think the aerial/sat photos would be a great 
source even for tracing maps and identifying and classifying all kinds
of different features, picking out buildings and green space etc.
But we can't buy ikonos data for less than a minimum spatial sample
that would set us back about 700 pounds. Where can we get a chunk of
1m / comparable aerial photography to experiment with?

I think a pool of hardware would be a great thing. especially if we
agree where it should be distributed, there are cyclist groups in
tower hamlets and in southwark who have done pothole reporting
projects and would probably be into a mass map-collection exercise
especially with a friendly competition aspect. A GPS pool could
provide for week-long exercises. We could get bike mounts.

We can do this ongoingly though, and we can hopefully raise a bit more
funds for this purpose or for backwards recompense in the purchase of
satellite photography, and the latter is 'actionable' now...

we could probably come to some arrangement where OKFN, as the funder,
actually purchases the data, and then we members of all the different
projects here become 'members' of it somehow. Yeah, we should
definitely look into access and re-use restrictions carefully...

thanks, steve


-jo