I spent this past weekend at the annual OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map, held in Denver this year.  [While I think that pairing it with the FOSS4G conference was a terrific idea, I was not able to stay this week for the latter event, but I'm excited to hear from my Azavea colleagues, David, Justin and Matt about that event].

I’m going to walk through some highlights of the event from my own perspective.  I’ve written a lot about OpenStreetMap in this blog, so it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of this project that sets out to create a shared and open map of the planet.  A lot has happened in the past year, but here are some of the things I saw as important or just plain cool:

• MapQuest and OSM – MQ has been a big contributor and user of OSM. They are working on new quality assessment software tools and hope to release them to the community soon.  This will help to highlight the major swaths of the US, in particular, where the data needed for routing and geocoding needs to be fixed.
• Bing and OSM – Steve Coast did an overview of Bing contributions to OSM since he joined Microsoft:
• Bing aerial imagery – Bing has agreed to share its high quality aerial imagery with the OSM community. This is a big deal, as it will enable more mapping to be done without physically traveling to a site and Bing’s imagery is much higher quality than was previously available to the community
• DetectRoad API – deriving street vector data from Bing aerial imagery
• Windows Phone 7 OSM Editor – the MS Bing folks are working on this
• Frontdoor Addressing – a free and open app to move points that were geocoded to the rooftops of residences to the front door.  150 million records.  Microsoft has agreed to share all results with OpenStreetMap under the OSM Open Data license.
• ArcGIS and OSM – Esri continues to invest in tools for editing and using OSM data.  The ArcGIS OSM Editor was upgraded in the spring to version 1.1 and Esri is working on version 2, which was just released in beta.  Some new directions Esri is taking include:
• Overall objective is to add support for OSM throughout Esri stack.
• Initial objective is to add support for publishing OSM through ArcGIS Server, including support of editing via the Javascript API.
• OSM in Japan - two presentations by Daniel Kastl on the history of OSM in Japan; challenges specific to the Japanese language, addressing systems and urban structure; and use of OSM for earthquake/tsunami response and recovery.  Nostalgia for me as I recognized all of the unique and wonderful things about living in Japan.
• Mapnik – David Zwarg told me about a lightning talk about Mapnik2, which he says “has TONS of awesome features”
• Gameification – Peter Batty pointed to the need for a more game-ified OSM editing experience that might bring in a larger audience of editors.  I think there is a lot to be said for this.  There was an ad hoc session on Sunday focused on this question and the potential for a game-like user experience to potentially expand the OpenStreetMap community but also to potentially negatively affect data quality.
• Walking Papers – Michel Migurski (Stamen Design) summarized recent work on his Walking Papers project to a standing-room-only crowd, including interesting applications of Astrometry algorithms to geolocating map images taken from phones.  Other highlights include support for multiple languages, atlas (cutting up a scene into 4-up, 16-up, etc.) and tweaks that support other audiences (crisis mappers, educators and museums).
• Migurski followed up this performance on Sunday with a rousing plea to make creating and using OSM data a lot easier.  I have to admit, if you are new to the OSM community figuring out how to either use or contribute is daunting.
• Cool Tools I Didn’t Know About
• TopOSM - OSM maps overlaid on topographic elevation maps
• Cartagr.am
• Acetate - attractive stylesheets for data visualization
• TileStache - renders vector and raster tiles from contemporary map sources – think of it as a next generation TileCache
• ImpOSM – next generation importer for OSM data
• Cascadenik – cascading stylesheets for working with Mapnik

Whether for commercial software or open source projects, the crafting of a license is one of the most important decisions a company or team can make.  The license determines who can use the software, how it can be used as well as how it can be shared.  Open data projects, while different from open source software, face the same types of questions.

OpenStreetMap is probably the single largest and most significant open data project in the geospatial realm.  The project was started because “most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.” Up until now, OSM has been using a license called Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA).  However, OpenStreetMap is more like a database than it is like a text document or photograph and database projects have run into some specific problems with the CC family of licenses.  The OpenStreetMap project is proposing a move to the Open Database License (ODbL).  Like many collaborative projects, the move is being made by submitting the change and the justification for it to the community for review, comment and vote.

Why make this move?  What’s wrong with the CCBYSA license? A lot of people use the CC licenses to publish their articles, photos, paintings and other creative work.  But the various forms of the Creative Commons licenses are designed to work within the legal infrastructure the surrounds the concept of copyright.  Structured databases are collections of facts.  When factual data (like streets drawn on a map) are arranged the way you’d expect it to be, it’s not necessarily protected by copyright law, particularly under U.S. copyright law, which only protects works that arise from creativity.  If copyright doesn’t apply to factual data and the CC licenses are based on copyright law, we have a problem.  The is the core of the issue.  Even the Creative Commons folks have said that the CCBYSA license should not be applied to databases.

The new proposal, ODbL, resolves the issues by applying copyright where it applies and applying contract law where it does not.  It attempts to take the best of both worlds and create a happy medium that applies to database projects like OSM. As perhaps the largest open database in the world, OSM was one of the touchstone cases that the Open Data Commons and Open Knowledge Foundation used to build the license.

But it’s also interesting to note what it won’t cover.  The ODbL will only apply to distribution of the OSM database.  Contributions to OSM (like GPX tracks and other database edits) are covered by a Contributor Agreement which will refer to the ODbL as the means of distributing their contributions.  It won’t cover image tiles generated based on the OSM database.  It won’t cover the OSM wiki, which, since it is text and therefore considered a creative work, will remain covered by CCBYSA.  And it won’t cover the software source code used to run the entire OSM system – that will be usually, but not always, be covered by the GPL.

There remains some controversy within the OSM community. Many members, including one of the founders advocating for the change, feel that a completely free, Public Domain license (no limits on usage) would be preferable.  The ODbL will retain the “share-alike” concept of the current CCBYSA license (requiring both attribution and that changes be submitted back to the community and distribution carry the same terms). They feel that the spirit of reciprocity codified in this approach is stronger. The new OSM license will include both the concept of attribution and share-alike because many members of the community feel that this limitation benefits the project.  Nonetheless, others feel strongly that a truly public domain situation would be better in the long run, encouraging broad usage without consideration for consequences.  In the best democratic tradition, however, both sides express their positions in Vote Yes and Vote No pages.  Check them out.  And if you are an active member of the OSM Foundation, make sure you cast your vote.

You may be tempted to file this under “boring”, but the nuances of licenses are an important part of the creative economy in which we operate.  They set the terms under which we interact with each others work.