[OSM-talk] Ongoing bulk uploads of GPS traces?

Sam Wilson sam at archives.org.au
Wed Oct 13 08:50:03 BST 2010


  Hi,

I work for a company in Western Australia that has a dozen or so 
vehicles traveling all over regional WA and all equipped with GPS 
trackers, taking waypoints at 30s intervals.  I am going to be allowed 
to upload the data to OSM.  I'm just wondering what issues I'm facing...

1. We use OSM maps for navigation, and so management are quite able to 
see the value that could arise from our giving this data to OSM, because 
it would make the maps better.  But there is a bit of a gap between 
lots-of-GPS-traces and lots-of-well-tagged-roads!  What can I do to 
bridge this gap? (I mean, trace over the GPS trace, I know, but that's 
going to leave a lot of 'highway=road' tags; is that okay?)

2. What form of permission do I need to get from management, and where 
does it get saved? Is there a pro forma letter somewhere? What licence 
do we release the data under?

3. Is a single daily trace suitable?  I mean, all vehicles' traces put 
together in one file and uploaded (under, I guess, a separate account -- 
but still owned by me)? Or is there some automatic way of doing this?

But really: is this worthwhile?  Will my company benefit?  Will OSM benefit?

Thanks for any help,

Sam.



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