Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The #location of the Ruïnekerk is 52°40'10"N, 4°42'1"O

The Ruïnekerk is one on a list of monuments in Bergen (NH). This list is available on the Dutch Wikipedia and, this list was provided to the Dutch chapter by what can be considered the "copyright holder" for this data.

This is a well defined subset of clean data that exists in a Wikipedia. The problem that we face is that we do not know for many data-items who the copyright holder is. This is not only a problem in the free content world, it is no less a problem in the commercial world.

In Techcrunch there was an article proposing an open database with the kind of data we want to express in OpenStreetMap format. The funny thing is that almost all these commercial organisations have much of their data because of the cooperation of the public. That is in and of itself not enough of a reason to make such an open database freely licensed. What should be convincing is the ability of mashing data .. particularly with Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

No comments: