[OSM-talk] [HOT] [CrisisMappers] odbl non-agreement and humanitarian exceptions.

[Toby Murray]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Jaakko Helleranta.com
<jaakko at helleranta.com> wrote:
> (Added talk-ht at osm as that might well reach some ppl involved that the other
> lists don't.)
>
> Having bn part of the below-mentioned #OSM IRC discussion (finally using irc
> after 15 years of avoiding, ayii!) Here's my 2 cents:
>
> The OSM Haiti data's v1 odbl complient edit rates for nodes and ways are 68%
> and 54%, respectively. v1+last edit comopliency rates are 89 and 95%,
> respectively.
>
> These figures r for data of the whole island and the losses in DR are
> _significantly_ higher. That will have a partial impact on e.g. Local
> OpenGeo-related economic activity, which has a direct link with local
> sustainable hunanitarian activities and all data activity on the Haitian
> side.
>
> In any case the direct impact is -- in my guesstimate -- to at least a
> quarter of Haiti data. And the viability of OSM will take a clear hit
> because of this. And that impacts humanitarian use without a doubt. Unless
> there's a renewed interest to help remap Haiti from the community --
> or(/and) the data damage is limited in some ways.
>
> The thing is that we (in and currently actively involved with Haiti mapping)
> are limited in capacity to do more advanced data loss mitigation and I think
> also the capacity to remap is limited in a number of ways.
>
> So, having heard that some gave and got a special right to allow retaining
> his data in OSM for a given bbox _in the U.S._ I don't see why we wouldn't
> try that in Haiti as well as other humanitarian operations areas.
>
> With best regards from Haiti,
> -Jaakko

To be clear, the current mechanism for overriding ODbL cleanliness is
based on changesets and documented on the wiki[1]. So to clean all
contributions from a given user in a bbox requires looking up all
changesets by that user which lie entirely within a bbox and then
adding them to the wiki. The list of changesets there is periodically
pulled in by the maintainers of license change analysis tools. And it
isn't limited to the US although that is one of the bigger use cases
for this method of overriding license acceptance.

I wrote a bit of python[2] that parses the weekly changeset dump from
planet.osm.org into a database to make it queryable for such things.
You are free to set up your own database or I would be happy to do
some queries by request on my database.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quick_History_Service
[2] https://github.com/ToeBee/ChangesetMD

Toby