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Liberating your My Maps data

Richard in his post at the OpenGeoData blog, highlights the work of Google’s Data Liberation Front which aims to make sure that user data hosted on Google servers can always be exported out for use in other services or applications.

So what of Geodata, well contrary to popular opinion if you create a My Maps mash up you are just one click away from exporting your map data as a KML file;  just click on the link marked “View in Google Earth” and a KML file of your map is downloaded.

Richard asks if it is possible for Google to offer a “mass tracing” right similar to that offered to the Open Street Map Community by Yahoo. This I’m afraid Google cannot currently do as we don’t have the rights to offer this on a universal basis.

I hope this is a useful clarification, sorry I could not add a comment on the blog itself for some reason.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network

49 replies on “Liberating your My Maps data”

Ed,

The explanation is still a bit confusing to me.

I have a simple example that will help clarify the ideas involved.

There is a site in Argentina that collects POIs. It’s very simple: you click on a Google map or satellite image (using the Google Maps api, of course) and create a new POI, which you then tag.

The very home page of this site explains that all POIs are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

There is also a way to download all the POIs in the site.

I understand by your comments that they own these POIs which they are licensing under a license compatible with OSM.

Is bulk uploading all these POIs to OSM a violation of Google ToS?

Guillermo,

Without seeing the site it impossible to be definitive, the issue is with the bulk export of points and as others have pointed out it is not easy to define bulk in any universal sense, a thousand points nobody would have issue with, millions of points would be clearly “bulk”

My guess is the site you mention is somewhere between these two extremes..

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