[geo-discuss] [Geodata] Re: Geodata in CKAN and collaboration (was Re: Responding to the consultation on opening Ordnance Survey's data)

[Ian Turton]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:05 AM, Hamish <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> That menu has to include attribution, share alike and NC.
>
>
>
> I think this thread is going nowhere fast, so I'll try to let it
> die, but I'd would like to point out a couple of things.
>
> So is that grad student or university acting as a non-profit
> entity or not? Is the university a business or not? These are
> not questions that we humble research scientists can answer,
> so these datasets are useless to us. Our lawyers will always
> act to protect us legally, and tell us not to touch anything
> which might cause problems, even if it means getting no work
> done. But that's their job. I see the purpose of no-commercial-
> use as non-compete clauses. (which is essentially what the GPL
> does too, for whatever that's worth)
>

This is only an issue if you ask the lawyers :-)
>
> - there was a comment that "OpenStreetMap would *never* be used
> for scientific work." Well actually just last night I was reading
> a newly published (respectable) journal article which credited
> OSM as the datasource for one of the figure decorations. Granted
> the main OSM dataset wouldn't be much use for analysis unless
> you were a sociologist or something, but having it out there and
> usable does enhance our ability to communicate other ideas
> through better background maps.

We (Penn State's GeoVISTA center) are currently using OSM as our main
data set in the work we are doing in route extraction. There was just
no other way we could have acquired a street level network for the US
(except through loading  and cleaning each county from TIGER which
would have taken longer than the grant).

http://www.slideshare.net/ianturton/why-geolocating-written-routes-is-harder-than-it

Ian
-- 
Ian Turton