Sutripta wrote : „There is another question regarding licensing. What if a person says
‘You can use my trackplots for drawing roads in any noncommercial site, but I retain the right to use my trackplots in any way I want, including commercial.’
Obviously his trackplots cannot be uploaded. But can they be used? Like one uses it in JOSM to form a road layer, which one uploads, but does not upload the trackplot. „
If you upload those GPS-tracks of someone else, this person has still the right, to use the tracks just like he wants to do. OSm doesn’t make here any restrictions.
Sutripta wrote :** „I have a large number of GPS Trackplots for Eastern/ NorthEastern India.“**
To upload all these tracks in one turn, you can use the perl-scripts (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Batch_Upload). I didn’t use this up to now, so don’t ask me for details.
Sutripta wrote :** „Anyway, the question is if one has the option of putting in a road from a gpstrackplot without uploading the trackplot itself, and not putting in the road itself, what should one do? „**
If you are the owner of the GPS-tracks or someone else says: „ You can use my trackplots for drawing roads in any noncommercial site“ you should upload them in the way Oberaffe already described.
Why : In India we only have the Bing-images and we don’t know the offsets at all. So we can’t rely an these satellite images. We only come to a high accuracy of our data, if there are a lot of uploaded GPS-tracks. Then we can average together with the Bing-images.
In other countries the situation is better (aerowest in some parts of Germany; PCN in Italy…), where those satellite-images nearly don’t have an offset and a prescision up to 50cm.
If you don’t have the time to map the roads yourself, then you can only upload the track and wait till someone else does the mapping for you. In Rajasthan i found big regions without any GPS-tracks.
Sutripta wrote in Talk_in :** „Say one has a GPS trackplot at 1 sec intervals. Should it be put up raw, or filtered. If filtered, by how much?“**
In my opinion automatic filtering of GPS-tracks is useless. Potlach has a filter to remove unreliable points. This can be usefull, but then the uploaded tracks should be compared to other tracks and satellite- images.
Sutripta wrote :** „Both of these are fairly timeconsuming, which is why I guess one sometimes sees roads which seem to be drawn by the London Underground cartographers.
Next option (least effort, my choice) would be converting trackplot with good DOP. So what are the forums views on that? „**
I suppose, that the horrible roads, you mentioned, are from the AND-Imports or other imports before the BING-time. Converting GPS-tracks to a road is the easiest but not recommandable way to make roads.
Comparing with other GPS-tracks and satellite-images is indispensible for high accuracy. The precision of normal GPS-tracker like a Garmin Oregon is 10 to 20m. I don’t know any mappers who spend 3000€ (200 000 Rupies) for a GSP-tracker with a precision of 1m.
Of course, converted GSP-tracks are much better than those horrible AND-Imports. And other mappers could make the corrections. If these roads have an fixme-tag, it’s easier to find them.
At the moment only 10 to 15 mappers are working each day in India (http://osmstats.altogetherlost.com/?item=countries). That means, the number of mappers in India is comparible to Bulgaria, Romania…
This big continent needs more mappers to construct a good map. So everybody is welcome to contribute as much as he can.