(Oh come on, I know at least some of you are Dr. Who fans…)
If you have not read the news, OpenStreetMap will be removing their non-license-compatible roads this week. I stopped following the debate on this years ago, but basically they changed open licenses and have had to drop contributions that could not be re-licensed from the original authors. My understanding is that the amount of data that will have to be nuked will be very small.
If you have already contributed to OSM even remotely recently, you probably agreed to the new license terms and your data is fine.
My thought: after the redaction is finished would be a great time to check your home town and help put back any lost roads, etc.
Propsman sent me this rather zen bit of OSM the other day…
I certainly hope they won’t have to redact it. 🙂
(Seriously though, one of the major data quality problems with X-Plane is people creating train platform and building footprints out of actual train tracks. If you are working on an area, please check the tagging of stations and platforms to make sure they’re not actually railways!)
I do not have a schedule or plan for recutting from new OSM data – it’s an aspiration right now but there’s a lot on the short list we have to deal with first (like 10.10).
Wouldn’t it be possible to cache the data that’s about to be wiped out and put it in the sim? Or does it require anything special?
~Oz.
Not legally.
Actually OpenStreetMap will continue to provide a “planet download” of our entire dataset as a snapshot taken from before the data redactions, and released (of course) under the old CC-BY-SA2.0 license. e.g. right now you could grab a planet download: //planet.openstreetmap.org from the beginning of this month and it will have all the data. There’s no legal problem with data users doing that at all, indeed for many uses this would be our recommendation until the community has had a little time to patch up some new gaps in the data.
Going forwards, future snapshots (starting from some time soon) will be released under the new ODbL license, and these have some patches of data redacted, although the community is already filling in these gaps quite quickly.
Data users are not legally able to blend data from before and after the license change.
Now it just needs a little train on top of it going back in forth and desperately trying to get somewhere like in Sim City.
That’s surely the shortest railway branch ever. Wonder how much they charge for the ride… 😉
Hi, OpenStreetMapper here. I’m a bit surprised about the train track issue. Mappers tend to do all sorts of weird stuff, granted, but platforms and buildings made from train tracks would look strange on the usual OSM maps, too. So I would expect them to be discovered and corrected fairly quickly.
Sorry if this is obvious, but … are you by chance treating every way element with a railway key as a train track? There’s quite a bit of other railway infrastructure using that key, too, including railway=platform and railway=station.
There is definitely the chance that we are screwing up our OSM interpretation! That’s for me to look at in the next import. But people misuse the keys at times too; platform as track only looks bad if the railway has a real symbol – if it’s just a brown line, it’s hard to tell.
I’ll be looking through my local region to see if any data was affected – the OSM blogs indicate that they just finished the entire global redaction process today.
A OSM recut would be very VERY welcome as I know I’ve personally added in hundreds (*no exaggeration) of decent sized water bodies over the past months which were not originally in the database and therefore aren’t in XP10… many of these lakes and ponds have designated seaplane bases on them, which are currently landlocked in the sim.
Here’s to hoping a recut, or some method for users to do it themselves (*without a PhD) can come about in the near future. Here’s one vote from a user who would *greatly* appreciate it – primarily for the improvements in shorelines and water!
So there really aren’t any Dr Who fans!! Wasn’t Sarah Jane Smith the best? I still watch ‘Pyramids of Mars’ on DVD, such a spooky story.
Sutekh would rid the earth of those mini tracks!
OSM is truly huge, you can’t get it perfect for the entire globe. We can try though.
Thanks for keeping it real. 🙂 Working with Propsman is a little bit like working with the 10th Dr. when he’s lost his sonic screwdriver…
Who is the 10th Doctor?! I lost count after the 5th. Props strikes me more like the Brigadier! Or is that Austin? No more off topics, back to the Tardis for this Sontaran.