[OSM-talk] tracklog credibility

Corey Burger corey.burger at gmail.com
Sat Jul 14 08:21:42 BST 2007


On 7/13/07, Stefan Baebler <stefan.baebler at gmail.com> wrote:
> In http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jcomeau_ictx/diary/73
> user jcomeau_ictx wrote:
>
> Can anybody comment on the legality of using Google Maps to get
> approximate lat/lon points, formatting those points into a GPX file, and
> uploading to OSM? I just want to know if I can be open about it, or if I
> have to be sneaky. It's inaccurate enough that nobody could tell, by
> looking at the data, how it was sourced... but if this is really a Bad
> Idea, I'll just have to come up with another method, or save up for a
> GPS unit.
> /quote
>
> As far as i understand the legalities this  shouldn't be done.
>
> This brings up an issue how a GPS tracklog could be trusted.
> Basic GPX is simple to produce, requiring no more than coordinates,
> which can be artificially "enriched" with timestamps to be technically
> acceptable for OSM.

All this tracklog stuff bring up a fairly serious issue that tracklogs
cannot be edited.

I think we need, at a bare minimum:
* Deletion of tracklogs by admins
* Editing for track logs (to remove "noisy" tracks we know are not
good, such as when you drove into the store)
* Editing of tags on tracklogs (I would also like to see them
seperated by commas, to allow tagging such British Columbia or South
Africa)

After that, we migth want to consider whether or not to tag tracklogs
as trusted or not.

Thoughts?

Corey




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