[OSM-talk] "Snap to Road"

Dean Earley dean at earlsoft.co.uk
Mon May 15 17:51:55 BST 2006


Martin Thierer wrote:
>>> I've just noticed my GPS had the "snap to road" option turned on.
>>>  Would this make the data created from those GPX traces
>>> illegal/against copyright?
>>> 
>>> It doesn't have many roads around here but its just for
>>> discussion.
>> 
>> That will probably apply only to the on-screen marker (arrow, stick
>> man, whatever) rather than tracklogs, but probably worth checking
>> by walking parallel, but about 15 metres, to a known mapped road,
>> and see what the tracklog looks like. What model GPS is it?

Its a Garmin Emap ancient senile thing :)

> At least on my Garmin Etrex Vista "snap to road" also implies that
> the tracklogs are corrected to be on the roads.
> 
> To use such trackslogs is not only bad because I think that this
> indeed is a copyright infringement, I also sometimes found the roads
> from Garmin Mapsource to be not so accurate.

It's turned off now so should no longer be an issue for me.
I see the Getting Involved wiki page has already been corrected.

> Even worse, the "snap to road" algorithm sometimes misses branches
> and follows the old road for some time until it realizes that the
> branch was taken.

Interestingly, AutoRoute (with the same GPS) has frequently shown me
going straight down the  centre of a Y fork when it looses signal... :)

-- 
Dean Earley, Dee (dean at earlsoft.co.uk)

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