[Geodata] Fwd: [Geowanking] Interesting article on Open Data (crossposted)

[Mikel Maron, OSM]

Jo-


> But. Successful free software projects also need to emphasise:
> - Ease of re-use and re-purpose of the work by other people unconnected to the community
> - Sustainability of the effort beyond the original contributors
> 
> (The latter being an important rationale for existence of OSGeo)
>
> So Nat may be spot-on in terms of short-term tactics. In longer-term perspective, data infrastructure issues *are* important, can't be safely ignored:
> 
> - Can we merge versions of the same data source that have been corrected in different places?
> - Can we federate search across different registries or catalogues, or do we still need a Google-for-data one ring to rule them all?
> - Can we treat data like software, with packages and release cycles... or is data more of a stream, a trickle of updates negating the idea of "version"?
> 
> These are the questions being discussed around OKF right now. This may have been pure infrastucture-wanking a few years ago[0], but there are real problems asking these questions now (conflation > of OSM with Google MapMaker data for Haiti, for example).

All very good questions and issues to consider in light of the Humanitarian OSM Team. We are working so OSM continues to be relevant to the response community in Haiti, and in future crisis. And we are examining the OSM response itself, so that it is even easier for OSM contributors to produce map data that is useful in the wider community. In short, the idea is to template the response.

On the infrastructure side, Nicolas Chavent is currently working to harmonize various schemas in use by response agencies, and map those to OSM tags. From this, ETL process can facilitate import and export. This will certainly bring up merge issues as well, and to my mind is a combination of a technical problem (identifying the same feature in two different data sets) and a usability problem (what is 'diff' what geodata); and a social problem, making measures of trust networks part of this workflow (a more general issue for OSM as it grows as well).

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Tags

Finally on OSM and MapMaker, I'm sure we could have manually pushed through this, where useful in Haiti, but MapMaker's non-commercial license prevented this.

Best
Mikel
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