[OSM-talk] Maps and names

Etienne 80n80n at gmail.com
Fri Sep 1 09:33:53 BST 2006


On 9/1/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> Jens.Kammann at dlr.de wrote:
>
> > However, I would suggest to rather not adapt single applications
> > for using OSM data. I think I would be better to have a generic
> > Interface for displaying map tiles, points and ways - simular to
> > the APIs available from Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Visual Earth.
>
> This sounds like a nice theory.  But one important difference is
> that Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MSN Virtual Earth already have
> place names on their maps, something that OpenStreetMap lacks.
> Recently Steve wanted to throw out the Geonet Names Server
> database of geographic names because of potential copyright
> problems.  I just don't see the abundance of (copyright-)free name
> databases to chose from.  And OpenStreetMap would benefit from
> having one.


Unless the lat/long coordinates in the original Wikipedia articles were
collected using GPS then chances are that this information was lifted from a
map.  Wikipedia's GFDL license would not protect us from the original
copyright infringment.

The unique benefit of OSM in this respect is that our tracklogs provide
supporting evidence that the data was not derived from a copyright source.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that we should be doing more to enforce the
requirement that all data in OSM references it's source (tracklog,
photographs, landsat etc).

--
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
>
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