Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)

For those of you in Edinburgh and around - this talk by Chris Fleming of the OpenStreetMap project looks interesting:

Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)
Wednesday 14 November 2007
6.00 for 6.30 p.m.
at
The Faculty of Advocates, McKenzie Building (behind Fringe Office) High Street, Edinburgh


The announcement says:

"The OpenStreetMap project is a way of creating a free crowd sourced map allowing users use of the data for any purpose they might wish, avoiding some of the restrictions of both traditional mapping and seemingly free maps such as Google maps. Since it started over 5000 people in every continent have start mapping from places as diverse as Iraq, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Germany. Mapping of the whole of the Netherlands has been donated by a commercial mapping company and at the current rate of progress it is hoped that the mapping of the UK will be completed by the end of 2008.

In this talk, Chris Fleming will talk about and demonstrate the mapping process, how to create a map without violating copyright from the use of GPS devices to sources of copyright free data such as out of copyright maps and aerial photography. At its inception OpenStreetMap chose a Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution licence, and Chris will talk about the appropriateness of this licence for this kind of project, what this style of licence has encouraged and both the benefits and the limitations of the licence conditions. He will also consider alternative licences and the difficulties involved in changing licences.
Chris graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in Computer Science and Electronics in 2000. By day he works for Agilent Technologies (formally part of HP) based in South Queensferry monitoring systems for telecoms networks. While working on web development he became frustrated with the state of commercially available sources of mapping data and so became involved in the OpenStreetMap project in early 2006. Since then he has been participating in discussions around the usage and licensing of the data as well as talking about the project in Scotland and organising a mapping party in Edinburgh."

To book a place they ask that you e-mail Rosie Saunders at:
rosie.saunders@advocates.org.uk

You might also want to check out OpenGeoData. This is a blog about open maps, geographical data and OpenStreetMap.