• If the NYC government wanted to copy buildings that have changed from OpenStreetMap to the NYC building dataset they couldn’t as their data needs to remain in the public domain.

Are you proposing that OSM change to a public domain like license like CC0 or PDDL?

I would be inclined to give the argument more credence if not for three significant shortcomings

“Less” free

You start by stating that a copyleft license is less free. It is, at the very least, debatable if a license that does not guarantee continuing freedom to use the data and improvements is any freer. It allows anyone to convert the data into a proprietary dataset, taking away freedom.

Ignored costs of a decisive change

You’ve completely ignored the costs of changing the license. I’m not speaking solely of monetary and time costs, but also social costs. If you don’t recall, the license change from CC BY SA to ODbL was highly decisive, took considerable time, and taking such a decisive action has been compared to the project shooting itself in the foot. Any reasonable discussion has been derailed by people insisting on public domain (e.g. because that’s all some governments can work with), completely ignoring the fact that public domain, CC0 or PDDL would render us unable to use most government, company, or crowd-sourced open data. I see this happening again, with you talking about the census bureau.

I did a significant chunk of the work cleaning up data not covered by the redaction bot. It was weeks of soul-draining work and late nights. Any future change that would require us to remove the CC BY-SA/ODbL dual-licensed data in the database would be, by my estimation, worse.

An argument coming from a company with a questionable track record on compliance

When considering Alex’s argument it’s important to consider its context, including where it’s coming from. Mapbox and Mapbox customers have a questionable record on meeting the attribution requirements of the ODbL. We’re not talking about issues on space-constrained mobile apps, we’re talking about full-screen webmaps on a desktop display with no attribution text at all. This isn’t something that’s ODbL specific – a significant portion of open data out there has attribution requirements. Until recently https://www.mapbox.com/editor/ had no reference to OpenStreetMap, despite being based on essentially only OSM data at higher zooms. Even now, it hides the attribution in a means of questionable adequacy.

In conclusion, I found a particularly relevant quote from the Free Software Foundation > Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection. For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising “more users for this library” if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.

But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together. We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other’s free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.

p.s. Unless you have a special license, you’re not meeting the CC BY-SA license that the photo you’re using is distributed under

Yet, I think we may be able to get a long way with the ODbL. I think it at least worthwhile to share more details on possible legal interpretations. I remember at SotM-US last year, a productive BoF about licensing. Seemed to me like one question, geocoding into 3rd party databases, seemed close to a workable and widely supported realization. There was a lawyer who was interested and seemed to have some ideas about how it could work.

One of the points out of that session was that the companies involved with issues were going to provide to the LWG a clear description of their geocoding use case on which they were having issues, and this hasn’t happened.

With a vector PDF the glitches are laid bare a little more than web maps we’re used to (Some would normally be lost in sub-pixel fluff) especially as I had scaled it up to fill the whole A4 sheet. Certainly cycle.travel printout made for some fun pub conversations.

When I did work on print rendering I found mapnik PDF rendering was worse than AGG rendering for text. I’m not sure if this has improved with recent versions, but I ended up doing 600 DPI PNGs and embedding them in a PDF.

Yes, let’s all talk in Esperanto.

I do my best to attribute OpenStreetmap in my mobile app, one thing that is bothering me, however, is the requirement to make the logo clickable and it opens a webbrowser.

There is no such requirement. The attribution requirements for produced works are

You must include a notice associated with the Produced Work reasonably calculated to make any Person that uses, views, accesses, interacts with, or is otherwise exposed to the Produced Work aware that Content was obtained from [OpenStreetMap], and that it is available under [the ODbL].

Normally this is done with hyperlinks because that’s by far the easiest way to meet the requirements in a medium where you can do hyperlinks, but if you’ve got one where it doesn’t make sense, why not use plain text.

You could use the 4.3.a example notice from the ODbL, including the plain text of the URIs as suggested. This works out to “Contains information from OpenStreetMap.org, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL) (opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl)”

Comment from mgehling on 6 December 2013 at 17:05 > SPAM

Pardon? Please assume good faith and be careful before sending a message accusing a mapper of spam. Particularly in a case like this where the message isn’t spam.

Something worth noting is that with a public-domain database you are unable to use most government data. Most governments are releasing data under licenses that require attribution, which cannot be used as public domain data.

Note - do NOT upload GADM data to OpenStreetMap. It is not under a compatible license.

There is actually a general consensus against the importing of property lot data into OSM.

Stuff like fences, hedges, etc get mapped and are verifiable, but these don’t always correlate to property lots. Many times what you’d think was one lot when looking on the ground is really multiple ones. Then you get buildings that sit on multiple lots, etc.

Much of the CanVec water data in many regions is over 30 years old, I’d be bold in deleting it if you can’t see any signs.

The big difference between osm2pgsql and pgsnapshot is osm2pgsql is lossy, so can disregard most of the tags.

The other tips are

• Use –write-pgsql-dump and if you want geometry columns build them with osmosis. It’s a more manual process but it is way faster.
• If you need geometry columns and have the RAM, give java 32GB of heap space, otherwise put the node location store temp files on a SSD
• When building indexes, omit any indexes you’re not planning to use. If you’re just performing tag analysis, you could get away with no geometry indexes, and the nodes geom index takes more time then loading the data.

For reference, creating and loading the dump files takes 10h51m on my home dev server and with decent sequential disk speed is CPU bound if you have in memory node store.

The --read-pbf-fast option with as many workers as CPU cores may help a bit here.

I ran into a similar problem with addressmerge, except my addresses could be marginally outside the buildings. I solved it by adding a column in which I buffered the geometry with

UPDATE import_addresses SET buffered_geom = geometry(ST_Buffer(geography(geom),N));

where N was the distance, on the order of 1-2 meters (real meters, not mercator meters). For some purposes you might want to reproject but I was working in WGS84.

For mercator you could just use ST_Buffer and multiply N by a factor, but I had to do the reprojections.

Another trick for doing the JOINs between addresses and buildings was to pre-filter with && and then do ST_DWithin(geography(…), geography(…), N)

In my code this was expressed as

a LEFT JOIN b ON a.id != b.id AND ST_Expand(a.geom, PRECOMPUTED_DEGREES) && b.geom AND ST_DWithin(geography(a.geom), geography(b.geom), DISTANCE)

with PRECOMPUTED_DEGREES being DISTANCE * scale, where scale is chosen from the point closest to the pole in the region I’m considering.

Always good to see more people from BC

pnorman, from Vancouver

On the SFPR or Port Mann?

On the SFPR I believe it’s just a shoulder in the opened part. The lanes are wide and it’s a decent smooth shoulder, so it’s not too bad.

On the Port Mann I imagine they will be the last part to go in. This isn’t solely because of a disregard for bikes, they’re also in the last part to be constructed.

The SFPR is a good route for going from the Patullo to 176th/Barnston on a bike. The old route through Whalley, Gildford and Jhonson Heights involved a lot of stop lights, traffic and hills. The SFPR has fewer of all of these. There are no exits or stop lights on the part of the SFPR that’s been constructed, there’s just the ones off of the ends which aren’t actually part of it.

Thanks - it should be fixed. Also there’s a new layer in P2/JOSM by default, bc_mosaic. It’s composed of the various layers stitched together into one layer which represents the “best” of the imagery.

I did some work with the BC/Washington State border some time ago using the IBC data

The IBC data is legally okay to use, so there’s no worries there.

By far the biggest task on the border is de-duplicating the various ways. Simply put, the border is a mess. The position is relatively easy to fix once the duplicate ways are fixed and all the boundary relations are okay.

I’ve prepared .osm files for the SE Alaska and Portland parts of the border at http://took.paulnorman.ca/ibc/

The best workflow I’ve found is to first clean up the border, making all of the boundary relations topologically consistent and then merge through point by point the turning points and monuments, merging existing nodes to them.

I’m currently working on SEAlaska.osm

I did not convert from NAD83 to WGS84 but this is in practice a non-issue as the differences are minimal.

For way 41789598 tags were added by Scocasso who didn’t accept, so those tags have to be hidden.

For way 31158977 highway=residential was removed in v5 then added in v6.

For way 92818746 most of the nodes (e.g. osm.org/browse/node/639232838) appear to be from amai who didn’t accept, so the nodes got deleted which required changing the way.

Could you provide a link to the imports@ and talk-us@ mailing list discussion that happened before you started this upload? I can’t seem to find it.

Welcome to OSM. It’s good to see another editor in BC. I’m based out of Vancouver myself.