ITO World have now made use of that data to do a comparison with OpenStreetMap and produce a set of tiles which can be overlaid on OpenStreetMap to highlight roads in OS Locator which do not appear to be in OpenStreetMap — that doesn’t always mean the road is missing, or even missing a name — sometimes it just means we don’t agree on what the name is!

A case in point is a road near me called Oxenden Drive. At least that is what OpenStreetMap thinks it is called — the OS Locator data calls it Oxendon Drive instead as shown in this show of OpenStreetMap with the ITO World overlay:

Oxenden or Oxdendon?

So today I paid a visit to recheck the name on the signs and sure enough, the signs agree with OpenStreetMap and say Oxenden Drive.

The Hertfordshire County Council Gazetteer seems to agree with Ordnance Survey (Oxendon) while Royal Mail’s address database comes down on the side of Oxenden.

At the end of all that I’ve decided to leave it as it is, as Oxenden Drive, but who knows what the real answer is…

Well I’m delighted to say that today a representative of the publishers posted a comment on that piece apologising and explaining what they’re doing to correct things and to make sure it doesn’t happen in the future.

So I think that’s a belated “Well Done” to New Holland Publishers.

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

By way of comparison, here’s how the same area looks in OpenStreetMap at the moment:

The Isle of Dogs from OpenStreetMap

Obviously the maps in the book have had extra information added, and some things like stations changed a little, but the base map is clearly both OpenStreetMap data and OpenStreetMap cartography.

Naturally enough the first thing I did was to turn to the acknowledgements to see what nice things they would have to say about the project, and indeed we do get a mention, though more in passing than anything. What it says is:

All other maps by Steve Dew using base maps by Openstreetmap

More alarming however was what I found at the front of the book, among all the other copyright statements, where it has the following line:

Copyright © 2010 in maps New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd

Whilst it is probably true that there is some copyright (in the additional work done on top of the base map) which vests with them, there is also clearly a substantial amount of work whose copyright lies with members of the OpenStreetMap project.

As far as I can tell nowhere does it indicate that the maps carry a CC-BY-SA license, which they must do, by virtue of being derived from OpenStreetMap maps which carry that license.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that people are using our work (and my own work even – some of the area shown above was surveyed by me) in this way – that’s the whole point after all. I just wish they would spend five minutes to properly credit us and to point people at the license, both of which the license actually requires them to do.

For the record, the first map in this post is © OpenStreetMap and contributors and New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd and the second is © OpenStreetMap and contributors. Both are licensed under CC-BY-SA.

]]> http://compton.nu/2010/05/how-not-to-credit-openstreetmap/feed/ 6 http://compton.nu/2010/03/response-to-os-consultation/ http://compton.nu/2010/03/response-to-os-consultation/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:42:48 +0000 Tom http://compton.nu/?p=259 I finally got around to writing my response to the government consultation on releasing Ordnance Survey data – you can read my formal response but the summary is basically that yes I would like them to release some data but there are serious issues around some of the details such as the proposed license.

The basic editing of roads and such doesn’t seem to be much improved from the (fairly dire) interface we saw in the previous alpha builds – trying to move nodes in a way is still way harder than it should be, working out how to start a new way is even harder, and it still seems to be impossible to end a way unless you remember that you want to do so before you add the last node. As to extending a way well I’d forget it if I were you as I’ve never found a way to do it, or to join a new way onto an existing one (which would be a workaround for not being able to extend a way).

Presumably there is some help somewhere, but there is no effort to promote it as far as I can see – no “you might want to read this before you start” type prompts. There is a “help” link but it just goes to a CloudMade wiki page showing how to connect Mapzen to your OpenStreetMap account.

One word of caution by the way – there doesn’t seem to be any indication whether or not you have any outstanding edits that need to be saved, and the “Close and Exit” button does exactly that, without any sort of warning if you have unsaved edits which will be lost.

Perhaps the most worrying thing however is the so called “Mapzen Dashboard” which provides the entry point to the editor. That isn’t the problem however – the problem is that it provides it’s own, CloudMade hosted, social environment with “friending”, “messaging” and “home locations”. Anybody familiar with OpenStreetMap will know that the core site already provides all those things (though not as slickly) so the obvious question is what exactly CloudMade are doing duplicating this? Is this an attempt to create some sort of parallel community to the main OpenStreetMap community?

Overall I think we have to class the editor as a fail for now, and the dashboard as something that needs more explanation.

The comments on their blog posts rather beautifully demonstrate just how quickly you can trash a carefully built brand by failing to anticipate and prepare for the load generated by your own marketing antics. It really is a brilliant exhibition of just how EPIC a FAIL can be.

This was all of interest to me because they are apparently making use of OpenStreetMap data in some way – exactly how is not entirely clear because nobody can get in to find out!

They probably think they’re going to rake it in – lower costs + higher price = more profit, right? Well except for this small piece of economic theory called supply and demand guys – if your higher price kills the demand then you won’t sell any and high profit x low sales may well be less than low profit x high sales.