[OSM-talk] "derivative" work and source/created-by tag

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Tue Apr 24 17:01:21 BST 2007


Frederik Ramm wrote:

>     I have changed a lot of coastline manually in the last few days,
> often with reference to Landsat imagery. Would you in such cases
> remove the "source" or "created-by" tags on the coastline that refer
> to the coastline importer originally creating the data?

My take is that you can replace these tags with impunity - because OSM  
is a wiki, where the history of each item is stored.

Parallel example: Any edits created by JOSM are tagged with  
"created_by=JOSM". This applies to a pretty huge chunk of the database.

I wondered about Potlatch signing its edits with "modified_by" or  
"edited_by", so you might have "created_by=JOSM;modified_by=Potlatch".  
But there's no need: that's stored in the history.

Therefore I decided to stick with the tag "created_by=Potlatch alpha".  
So way 234590 version 1 might be "created_by=JOSM", same for versions  
2-20, then v21 "created_by=Potlatch alpha", and v22 "created_by=JOSM"  
again.

That gives the most accurate history of the editing history and  
enables us to trace any contamination if required.

cheers
Richard





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