[OSM-talk] geonames.org

Marc marc at geonames.org
Wed May 23 14:09:30 BST 2007


Hi Gabriel

I am Marc from the geonames.org project. Someone pointed me to this not 
so recent posting of yours :
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-April/012807.html

The posting alleges that geonames is considered "harmful". It seems that 
there is a misconception of how geonames.org is working. Geonames is 
aggregating data from free sources, mainly national mapping agencies. 
The googlemaps interface allows users of the data to check whether the 
data accuracy, coverage and quality of geonames.org is sufficient for 
their needs before they write web service clients or download and import 
the data in their data base. It also allows to quickly correct errors.

Here just two points why this use of the googlemaps api does NOT make it 
a derived work :
1. Geonames is using a lot of data sources. gmaps is not the only one. 
In fact gmaps is even negligible. There are thousands of manual moves 
using the satellite/map view compared to millions of records from many 
other sources.
2. Even if a user is using gmaps to move or set a marker, it is still 
not an exact copy as the user determines where to set the marker. The 
latitude and longitude will differ wildly from what gmaps is using 
internally. "Marker" for geonames typically means a populated place.

A lot more points and a long explanation in legalese (in German) is 
available here :
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/262.page#1500

Cheers

Marc




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