They have a special exception for wikipedia, but not for OSM. I would like to undestand why.

Well,from what I saw, it would be ok. OSM is not a travel site, it is a mapping site. the license is compatible. etc. My feeling was that the link was removed because it was a link, not looking into if OSM fits the policy. my reading of the policy would allow links to osm. Of course I can be wrong.
mike

Yes, they have detailed instructions on how to export maps from osm for usage there. But they are still removing the LINKs to osm. I would like to have a link from shkoder to the wikiproject shkdoer.
thanks,
mike

NICE! no I did not see that one yet. thanks

Here this changeset here :
osm.org/browse/changeset/4362442

was derived from this photo here :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonythemisfit/2443746612/

Well, here is my plan :
1. be able to take the osm id from the clipboard (in josm ctrl c on an object) and create a link to that way.
2. be able to download the geometry of the osm object and add it as attributes of the object.
3. be able to assign geometries to points as well
4. be able to determine the coordinate of new items from the existing geometries (a 3d grid)
5. be able to copy new items from inkscape into josm

The idea is this:

if you know the fixed point of some items, and you know the relative positions of others from the photos, you can add in the new relative items.

If you have a row of houses along a street, then you can just add them in to osm one after another to fill up the street according to the geometries of the photo.

Then if you have them tagged on the photo, it should be possible later to do some type of sanity check on the coordinates, each pixel will have some type of size associated to it, according to the geometry of the map.

You can then pull the information back from osm, into the photo and check them, does the size of the house match the box on the picture in any way?

In any case, this is what I have been experimenting with.

Even if we dont have software to do this, we have brains, and our brains should be able to check the relationships.

You can see this area of the map
osm.org/?lat=41.989812&lon=20.705707&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF

All those houses I added in from the photo. and you can see the graveyard and the streets as a point of reference. Even if they are all shifted off in some direction we can fix that when we have more data.

If you add in all the buildings then it is then a matter of verifing them. But 10 buildings that fill up a street will have to have some type of even spacing to them.

mike

My suggestion is that we introduce a new tag into wikipedia and a new marker if the data is usable under UK or US copyright law. Then we would know what information is usable at all. Right now the maps and points in WP are not really sourced at all.

If you look at the difference between these two pages, you might think that WP is encouraging people to use google maps :
osm.wiki/JOSM/Plugins/WMSPlugin#Licensing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinates_%28obtaining%29#On_the_web

see my new thread on wikipedia foundation list
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-March/057454.html

Well, these are maps. Wikipedia is full of maps that we cannot use. Also wikipedia have systematically collected millions of datapoints from google maps.
The google map is still the preferred source for geohack.
How can that work? Only because google tolerates it or there is some legal basis to it?

Umm,
I did not see any source code for that tool when I looked.
if I had a nice payed university job to finance my work, then I guess I would not be able to contribute the results.

Please I dont care about the non free programs that do great things, why dont I point to google earth and say : oh why dont you make josm more usable?

mike

we can look for streets on restricted maps, and then use that information to scan those areas on the landsat and yahoo maps for confirmation. that would be a 100% legal use of a restricted map. dont you think?

OK!
well wikimapia is one such project.
Also the data derived from that could not be fed into osm, but it could be merged into a new derived work that has both datasources in it, like roadmatcher.

The point is that there are so many such datasources available, at least we could have wms and wfs layers, searching and other tools available for them.

In fact, the only thing that I am interested in is contours and polygons that can be extracted using gdal. that is what i would like to have.

We will have to go into what is fair use, what information is it legal to use in comparing streets. I think that it is for educational purposes possible to fairly use some data. There must be a way to do some clean room reverse engineering of the comparison data. For example, use that information to find public domain references that would collaborate the facts.

if you know that this street is off, and then find 10 web references to support that information, you could write a paper about that steet comparing the all available sources, giving its history etc.

that might be fair use.

if it is not doable, then it wont be done.
I wanted to present this idea and get some feedback.
thank you for your time.

Also, the main point of this is :
1. we can apply openstreetmap techniques to the closed problem of tracing. People can share the data with each other. It can be kept separate from osm data.

So the usage of that traced data as an overlay would be as legal as the tracing is, at least it would not affect osm and it would provide an alternative layer.

mike

The difference is
1. the issue of tracing is not even decided legally.
2. the comparsion of the vectors can for example indicate shifts or other small fine tuning issues that should not be subject to legal issues.
3. even if it turns out we cannot use it, at least we will get clarity, so the action would be to bring some type of decision to the question.

I have not looked at potlatch yet, I was fasinated that mapzen had source released and wanted to look at that.

Here is another tool that proclaims to support actionscript 3
http://www.swftools.org/

Today I did some simple experiments with compiling the mapzen code with the
haxe compiler. I did manage to get some of the code compiled after some hacking of it.

If it can be compiled with tools that support AS3 directly, even better!

thanks for the tips,
mike

Thats great! I will try it out immediately.
Thank you!

I have written to him for a statement.

Ahh, yes. We dont have this data split up yet. Also we dont want to import all parts... do you have any ideas for splitting?

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