[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Russ Nelson]

On May 6, 2009, at 2:02 PM, Dair Grant wrote:

> Russ Nelson wrote:
>
>> TeleAtlas data is copyrighted, and when licensed is licensed under an
>> incompatible copyright.
>
> The data you're proposing taking from Wikipedia is probably derived,  
> via
> Google, from that same TeleAtlas (or Navteq) data.


Or OpenStreetMap data.  How would you know?  Perhaps TA and N have  
easter eggs.  Just to make things interesting, there are many  
potential sources of the Wikipedia coordinates.  It's quite possible  
that you would have both TA and N claiming that they own all of  
Wikipedia coordinates?  But the use of easter eggs is to prove that a  
majority of the data is infringing because it can be proven that a  
minority of the data is without doubt infringing.  What happens if two  
parties attempt to claim that they own all the data?

But y'all are STILL focussing on the WRONG PROBLEM.  Okay, here's what  
we have for objections:

   o Wikipedia editors are instructed to use Google Maps thus their  
geodata is potentially infringing.
   o We should be gathering our data from the field (so that means  
that the data we currently have is reliable enough, modulo any  
currently-known copyright problems).
   o But some of the Wikipedia POIs are already in OSM.

Can you see how this points a way forward?  We look at the Wikipedia  
lat/lons and POI names.  We look in OSM for nearby POIs.  We *replace*  
the Wikipedia lat/lons with OSM lat/lons.  In fact, we turn this into  
a continuous process.  When somebody enters a POI, we look in  
Wikipedia for that entity, and we link to the Wikipedia page and  
replace its lat/lon with our own.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson