Using OSM and search engines to find postcodes

[bitplane]

OpenStreetMap has tons of road names, those road names exist within some town, the town exists within a county. If we search the web for "road name, town name, county, " and then read and validate the next few characters from the search result we can find every postcode that has a business on it, without infringing on Royal Mail's database rights.

By using the mean location of the waypoints along the road, we have an approximate GPS location.

Does this sound feasible, and legal?

[jmdh]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:11:03AM -0800, bitplane wrote:

> OpenStreetMap has tons of road names, those road names exist within some
> town, the town exists within a county. If we search the web for "road name,
> town name, county, " and then read and validate the next few characters from
> the search result we can find every postcode that has a business on it,
> without infringing on Royal Mail's database rights.
>
> By using the mean location of the waypoints along the road, we have an
> approximate GPS location.
>
> Does this sound feasible, and legal?

Nope, we can't do this - it is infringing on RM's rights in just the
same way as if we'd copied the data directly from the PAF, and we don't
want to run the risk of polluting our database with data gained in this
way. This is why we're using out of copyright maps as a basis for our
collection.

You're obfuscating the search method, but ultimately you're still
programmatically extracting data from the PAF.

Cheers,
Dominic.

--
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)

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[Gaz Davidson]

I've given this some more thought and have a safer idea. Contact hand
edited, paid for business directories and ask for permission to search
their sites for post codes. Then stick all these into a custom google
search engine and give osm users some web interface to it using
googles ajax api (rather than search bots which are against google's
terms).
Finally, get osm to implement some user level tag that says 'my edits
are public domain' and import only the ways made by these
contributors.
Rather long winded, but as far as i can see legal and certainly
achievable given enough time

On 1/22/09, Dominic Hargreaves <dom@...> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 03:11:03AM -0800, bitplane wrote:
>> OpenStreetMap has tons of road names, those road names exist within some
>> town, the town exists within a county. If we search the web for "road
>> name,
>> town name, county, " and then read and validate the next few characters
>> from
>> the search result we can find every postcode that has a business on it,
>> without infringing on Royal Mail's database rights.
>>
>> By using the mean location of the waypoints along the road, we have an
>> approximate GPS location.
>>
>> Does this sound feasible, and legal?
>
> Nope, we can't do this - it is infringing on RM's rights in just the
> same way as if we'd copied the data directly from the PAF, and we don't
> want to run the risk of polluting our database with data gained in this
> way. This is why we're using out of copyright maps as a basis for our
> collection.
>
> You're obfuscating the search method, but ultimately you're still
> programmatically extracting data from the PAF.
>
> Cheers,
> Dominic.
>
> --
> Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
> PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)
>
>

--
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