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OpenStreetMap Licence and News Wrap-Up

posted by Satri on Tuesday February 05, @12:43PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the when-things-can-only-go-from-better-to-better dept.

Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.

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OpenStreetMap: Simple Features vs Topology [+]

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Industry: Open Street Maps in WorldWind 2 comments [+]

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For more information and relative links (including the plugin xml), please visit The Earth Is Square blog.

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Head on over to Slashdot to see the always heated discussion.

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For a more detailed summary as well as user comments, please visit the All Points Blog link above.

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For a very detailed summary as well as example links to the imported dataset, please visit the Mapperz blog link above.

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OpenStreetMap in Baghdad and Other Locations [+]

When I show OpenStreetMap to friends and colleagues, I systematically talk about its coverage in Baghdad. Ogle Earth just did a comparison of the major webmapping sites specifically for Baghdad with screenshots. As much as OpenStreetMap is surprisingly great in some areas, a user comment reminds us it varies a great deal on the location, such as in this Turkish region: Live, Google, Yahoo, OpenStreetMap. See also related stories below.

• Spelling

  (Score:1, Interesting)

  by Anonymous Voxel on Wednesday February 06, @12:43PM (#2191)

  Your interest was piqued, so you took a peek and noticed the recent peak in USA OSM mapping, primarily due to the TIGER data import?
  • Nope.

    (Score:3)

    by Satri (3) on Wednesday February 06, @01:35PM (#2192)
    ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )

    When I did my comparison, I did it for my own city, which is in Canada. Even if yet incomplete, I was happily surprised at how fast data was added over my city in OSM (Montréal, if you really want to know ;-). I regularly check because I'm always enthusiastic about showing OSM to friends and colleagues.
    
    And yes, I saw that south of the border, TIGER data was added to the U.S., which constitute a marvellous addition.

    [ Parent ]