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

[John Smith]

2009/12/8 Paul Houle <paul at ontology2.com>:
>    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.

This is my personal opinion, based on probably wrong information, but
since no one else answered this might inspire someone to come up with
a better answer :)

Wikipedia is US based, and in the US a collection of facts can't be
copyrighted and neither can a location, so even though wikipedia is
cc-by-sa the factual information + location data isn't copyrightable
so cc-by-sa doesn't apply.