[OSM-talk] What to call OSM data?

[Tobias Knerr]

On 26.11.2012 14:06, Joseph Reeves wrote:
> Playing Devil's Advocate, "crowdsourced" isn't appropriate for large
> swathes of OSM data: Europe, for example, is dominated by imported, not
> crowdsourced, CORINE data.

I don't believe that Europe is "dominated" by CORINE data. Several
European countries never imported CORINE, and elsewhere most of the work
would still consist of roads and other non-landuse data.

Also consider that imports today almost necessarily have to be performed
with manual interaction (to avoid duplicates and so on) and by various
individuals. So even when imports take place, they are done in a
"crowdsourced" manner.

So I think "crowdsourced" is the most appropriate term that is still
meaningful.

> I'd describe OSM data simply as "open".

That's not wrong either, but not precise enough to distinguish a project
such as OSM from e.g. governments' Open Data efforts. That's because it
overlaps with open licensing, which I assume will be stored separately
in metadata, and various other associations of the term.

Tobias