SimpleGeo puts 20 million places in the public domain. | Hacker News Reader

SimpleGeo puts 20 million places in the public domain.

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87 pointszacharyvoase20 comments

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. <:)

"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!)

Right, but original presentations and arrangements of that information is.

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural)

Right, but I am not sure how a POI database has any sense of copyright-ability. Feist v. Rural states that a collection has to have a minimal requirement of creativity.

Foursquare and its venue classifications are probably can be argued for, but strict POIs are probably not.

All in all, I have to say thank you to SimpleGeo though. This is a huge step in the right direction.

Foursquare and its venue classifications are probably can be argued for, but strict POIs are probably not.

True.

All in all, I have to say thank you to SimpleGeo though. This is a huge step in the right direction.

Agreed on that! Good for them too ... great example of commoditizing one's complements.

(http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html)

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.

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.

Direct link:

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

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 :)

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

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