[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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