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Comment by andreagrandi | Hacker News Reader

Hello folks, author of Book Corners here. I just made the whole libraries db available for download (it's OBDL licensed).

It's available from every users dashboard (it's a ~2 MB compressed GeoJSON file). It includes both libraries orignally imported from OSM and additional libraries added by users.

While I still think the whole OSM process to submit back is a bit too much for the time I have available (but I still understand and respect), at least I want to give users an additional option to retrieve the data (in addition to the public API).

If you have any other advices, I will be glad to hear them and, compatibly with my spare time, I will try to implement them (if they make sense and are useful for users) :)

Thanks

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In the article, you claim:

> There are also important licensing questions. A user’s permission to send a library to OSM is not automatically the same as having a sufficiently clear right to release that factual information under terms compatible with OSM

which would imply that you could not make available your database available for download under ODbL. Yet you have made it available under that license.

Maybe that part of the article needs further editing?

Also, if the data of your tool is now available under ODbL, then the tasks related to importing it into OSM can be effectively performed by anyone, not necessarily you.

> Maybe that part of the article needs further editing?

Yes, I should edit it. I had not though about the bulk download until another user on Mastodon suggested it to me.

> Also, if the data of your tool is now available under ODbL, then the tasks related to importing it into OSM can be effectively performed by anyone, not necessarily you.

Definitely. I would be more than glad if libraries which are not on OSM were added back, I just don't have the required spare time to go through all the process and also maintain it.

How would you feel about integrating https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html? (which I make) as means of contribution?

This one sends data straight to OSM. I don't have my own database to "moderate", pictures are saved into a Panoramax-instance.

As users authenticate by logging in with OSM, the boring, risky legal stuff is handled by OpenStreetMap. Uploading images has a small print that says that their images will be reshared under CC-BY-SA.

The part where I suck is in creating a nice, polished website with extra pages, SEO, ...

Have you considered making OSM itself the submission mechanism? This could be as simple as having a static guide on how to add bookcases to OSM. Your app could also act as an OSM editor specifically for bookcases (not a general one).

Presumably they hope to provide richer data (i.e. photograph of the library) that OSM isn't interested in.

OSM is interested in pictures, even of bookcases:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:image

The only difficulty is data than can not be easily represented in key=value pairs, such as timetables for buses. But even this can be resolved by adding external references.

This is the correct approach.

I haven't. That would be a completely different app which I'm not interested in working on, I'm afraid.

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