OpenStreetMap
Yesterday Natural Atlas went live (read more)! It’s a new topo map and guide to the outdoors that anyone can edit. We got tired of bouncing between guide books, sites for campsites, sites for hikes, google, etc when trying to plan a trip into the outdoors. Natural Atlas is a fix for that. It’s a beautiful topo, where anything on the map can be clicked to bring up a page about it (that anyone can edit, add text, photos, and so on).
We love OpenStreetMap. Right click anywhere on the map and click “Edit Roads” to bring up the iD editor to edit OSM. Brandon Reavis and I have been working hard on sprucing up the Wyoming, Montana, Idaho area – particularly around outdoor points of interest (campgrounds, trailheads, etc)
Discussion
Comment from Alan Trick on 11 June 2015 at 20:11
Nice job. Looks like only a few US states are rendered right now. Would be interested in seeing Washington too.
Comment from coleman on 11 June 2015 at 20:57
Great looking map design. Usage of OSM data for services like this makes it even more motivating to improve the OSM data. Interactive trail maps driven from data I can update myself!
Comment from acostan on 13 June 2015 at 01:44
Es un gran trabajo, se debería colaborar para extender a otros lugares del mundo.
Comment from butrus_butrus on 15 June 2015 at 15:52
What a pity you don’t offer a possibility to edit the data in JOSM!
BTW, will you cover Europe soon as well?
Comment from Nakaner on 16 June 2015 at 06:52
Your Terms of Service state: > Geographic location data (latitude, logitude coordinates) from Natural Atlas cannot be used commercially without explicit written concent from an employee of Natural Atlas. If you’re interested in this data, please email *****@naturalatlas.com.
From my point of view “cannot be used commercially without explicit written concent” is not compatible to OpenStreetMap data license.
Comment from lxbarth on 16 June 2015 at 12:01
The terms don’t seem they’re globally forbidding vectorizing the map, although it would be good to define what specific latitude/longitude coordinates are meant in the ToS.
This is not the case. Placing markers on top of an OSM based map doesn’t per se make the marker locations subject to ODbL share alike. Only if you used those markers in a way that winds up extracting a Substantial subset of OpenStreetMap the marker data would be subject to ODbL share alike.
http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/
Comment from Brandon Reavis on 17 June 2015 at 00:36
@Nakaner
The post perhaps should make it more clear, but Natural Atlas uses the following things from OSM: Roads, Parking Areas, Residential/Commericial Areas, Interstate Exits, Buildings (Only the geometry, none of the attributes), and a small handful of other features. These things are only visually shown on the map, and are not tied to the website in any way.
Anything that has a page on the website is -not- derived from OSM in any way. Campgrounds, trailheads, hydrography, etc. either come from public domain government datasets, or we have manually added them in. The geographic data for these features is what cannot be used “commercially without explicit written consent”.
We are not mixing OSM data with other datasets and are well within the terms of the OSM license. The OSM data remains ODbL, but the Natural Atlas specific data is not ODbL.
Perhaps some day we will consider opening this data up, but strategically it isn’t practical right now. We have spent a massive amount of time blending and cleaning the different datasets that have gone into the map. Also, as we have just started, we don’t have much traction yet. Opening this data would greatly benefit our competition that does have traction.
About #1: We can’t forbid you from vectorizing OSM data from the map, but I don’t get why you would want to do that. Everything else on the map is not under ODbL for the above reason.
About #2: I agree with @lxbarth on this.
@lxbarth
I agree that clarifying the ToS would be a good thing to do. About the license of user-placed markers on the map: I have been curious about the same thing. Unless in a court someone could prove that a lot of markers were simply duplicated or derived from OSM features without a doubt, I don’t see how those markers would fall under ODbL.
The lack of clarity of the ODbL license is one very big reason why we decided not to use OSM for our outdoor features that show up on the website. We will not be spending time updating trails, campgrounds, trailheads, and such in OSM for this reason. We will spend as much time as possible improving roads and encouraging others to do the same however.
The other reason for it is a technical reason. Because of OSM’s loose nature, it would be very difficult to maintain a one-to-one link between things on the map and pages on the website.