

SimpleGeo puts 20 million places in the public domain. - zacharyvoase
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facts_should_be_free_simplegeo_puts_20_million_pla.php

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cpeterso
I don't know if this is good news or bad news for my secret hobby project: an
open-source, crowd-sourced version of Skyhook Wireless' or Google's
geolocation services. Currently, all this geolocation data is locked away in
proprietary databases behind non-free APIs.

Imagine if hostip.info used Wigle.net's Wi-Fi database instead of IP
addresses. This service could be used to implement a Free geolocation provider
for Firefox or freedesktop.org's GeoClue library. The Wi-Fi data (raw and
"cooked"/pre-triangulated) would be available for download for other
applications or data mining research.

Wigle.net has a crowd-sourced database of the GPS locations of 34 million
unique Wi-Fi networks, collected over 10 years. Unfortunately, the Wiglers are
extremely protective of their data. They do not share a data dump for
download. They have a web service, but the API requires every client to
register a username and password. The web service API is purposely
undocumented and only serves a subset of their Wi-Fi data. Even though the
data is crowd-sourced, they sell commercial licenses, but "will not comment on
future, past, or hypothetical customers".

Will SimpleGeo post a tarball of 20 million places on a FTP server? Or does
"open data" just mean that applications are free to do whatever they want with
the place data returned from a SimpleGeo API call? Those 20 million places
would provide a big boost to my current database of just 16,000 networks. <:)

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kbutler
"Copyright does not protect facts..."

<http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html>

(But it's very nice of them to make this collection and make it available to
all!)

~~~
mmalone
Disclosure: I work at SimpleGeo.

You're right, copyright does not protect facts _in the United States_. Rules
differ around the world. In the EU, for instance, there's a "sweat of the
brow" criteria for database protection.

Even in the US, though, copyright law is largely irrelevant. When you sign up
to use a web service you generally accept terms and conditions that lay out
exactly how you're allowed to use the service and the data you consume. From
that point on your interactions with the service are regulated by those terms
under contract, tort, and other common law statutes. If the terms say you're
not allowed to redistribute the data then doing so would be violation of
contract and you would be liable for damages. Basically, things get really
messy really fast.

I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. So, honestly, I'm not an expert on this stuff.
But I think most engineers agree that the current situation is sort of stupid.
Philosophically I agree with the copyright law as it stands. Facts should be
free. So CC0ing the data is just an explicit, formal, contractual statement
that we're not limiting how our data can be used anywhere in the world.

~~~
ma2rten
I have started to look into this as well. But it is not as simple, every
country in the EU actually has different copyright laws. Also the situation in
the US does not seem to be that clear either.

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d_r
Direct link:

<http://blog.simplegeo.com/2011/04/20/open-places-data/>

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brendannee
SimpleGeo's places API made it really easy to extend <http://walksy.com> to
generate walking tours on the fly for any US or Canadian city. The fact that
places are categorized made it possible to guess about which things would be
interesting points for a walking tour.

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ivan_ah
Very cool! I didn't find the link to the data though.

How big are 20M worth of data points? I guess there is are two coordinates (or
maybe box) and then a label. It could be several gigs.

I think if you are truly open and not just promoting your API you should allow
for a direct download of the entire data dump.

Perhaps you can use "requester pays":
[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/index....](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/index.html?ObjectsinRequesterPaysBuckets.html)

~~~
indiekid
We were careful to make sure the emphasis was on the non-restrictive license
on uses of the data. This isn't claiming to be a "open places database" but
maybe that can exist with this data as the backbone.

We are interested in doing a dump, but have some things to overcome first.
Beyond that, this isn't just promoting our API. To be clear, we were only
clarifying the license of the data with a blog post since there wasn't a clear
license before. The community has turned this into a bigger deal, so this is
by no means a self-promotion thing on our end.

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te_chris
In New Zealand we have a service called Zenbu (<http://www.zenbu.co.nz>) that
is a CCBY database of POI's. It's great because we're able to dump a csv and
integrate everything into our app. If that was available with this that would
be seriously powerful and a great step in the right direction towards open POI
DB's. There's no reason anymore for that sort of data to not be easily
accessible.

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Cherian_Abraham
This definitely lowers the barrier for entry to the location based services
sector for folks like us. We are very excited that SimpleGeo would do this.
One less thing to worry. Actually, one less important thing to worry about.
Thanks guys.

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tomkarlo
So when can someone take this and make a site with linked mobile app that lets
folks add to the data via checkins or something similar? Seems like this is a
great starting place for a mobile-enabled, public domain "wikipedia" of geo
info.

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SageRaven
I used the data at geonames.org some years ago for some odd-ball location
queries. I don't know how the data sets compare, but it's always nice to have
more freely-usable data out there.

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orblivion
I hope OpenStreetMap heard the news. I'm assuming they can mass-import this
stuff.

~~~
yellowbkpk
I would absolutely love to import this into OSM, but the data is locked behind
their API (which has access restrictions).

~~~
orblivion
? So basically, the data is public domain, if you can get it?

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indiekid
Correct, for now. We're currently evaluating a dump method as well, but
haven't been able to put much time on it as we've been busy working on our API
:)

~~~
snissn
A snapshot would almost be infinitely more useful for me to start developing
with your data!

