[OSM-talk] ??? Compatibility of OSM w/ CC-BY-SA sources ???

[Paul Houle]

    My major concern with a license change is compatibility with 
CC-BY-SA sources such as dbpedia,  wikipedia,  etc.

    So far as I'm concerned,  dbpedia and freebase are the core of a 
linked data space that assigns taxonomic identifiers to (most) "things" 
that exist,  and will really be critical to machine understanding 
efforts going forward.  I think we're going to see additional data 
'stuck' to a growing katamari ball of facts and relationships.  I think 
that that ball of data is going to form a 'giant component' that grows 
explosively,  and anything that isn't legally compatible with that space 
is effectively going to 'disappear;'  one of the reasons why Cyc really 
failed to make a splash is that organizations needed to make a huge 
investment just to get a good look at it.

    In the short term I'm primarily concerned w/ displaying slippy maps 
to display CC-BY-SA and PD-derived coordinates and shapes on.  That's 
one issue.  Another,  longer-term,  issue would be the construction of 
new products based on automated reasoning applied to ways in OSM.

    Note that freebase seems to be safe to merge with OSM data,  but I'm 
not sure if using OSM data prevents me from pushing 
corrections/enhancements that are found in my processing chain back into 
Freebase.