I have found a possible dataset that could be included into OSM - it is the database of points of interest in a specific region (Putrajaya federal territory, Malaysia). It comes from the Malaysian Open Government Portal.
Spend some time to look for the terms of use and anything related to legal and copyright.
Came across the Terms of Use (PDF, Malay language), and it was put on the front page. Rough translation pertaining to the important things, sorry for bad English:
I guess the data may be compatible to the OSM’s licence. So, those whom are doing (manual) import may use the source= tag. The question here, 3(b) says there should be a link provided to the Terms and Conditions, so how is it going to be like? Adding the link in the Wiki?
It may need to be entered on the higher level contributors page.
This is something that only the national level for OSM should be doing, as it requires consideration of exact legal situation.
The translation back into English seems similar to language used by the British government, but in their licences, there is an issue that some of the data may have come from third parties and such data isn’t covered by the licence. It can be difficult to know exactly what data is owned by the government, and what came from third parties.
Policies on bulk imports vary, but you should again get national agreement before doing one. It is generally considered better to use such lists as lists of things that should be surveyed on the ground, so they can be entered as source=survey, rather than importing them blind. They should never be imported without checking to see if the feature is already mapped nearby, and it is not usually safe to assume that the location given is better than that already mapped.
Unfortunately, there is no such an official Malaysian entity linked to OSM that will deal with all the legal matters (yet).
The dataset gives descriptions about a certain public amenities (e.g. schools, places of worship, parks) and certain kind of buildings and infrastructure. It also includes any related address or contact details.
I will definitely use it to manually put addresses and contact details, but only for what’s been put in the map. In addition, your advice to use it as a list that needs to be surveyed is fair - I’ll definitely keep that in mind, I’m not a local in that place. I wouldn’t simply bulk import this dataset due to offsets, etc.
From what I understood, should I seek clarification first to know whether this particular dataset contains any data from third parties?