OpenHistoricalMap/Tags/Key/license

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Description
Indicates the data license associated with the feature. Edit this description in the wiki page. Edit this description in the data item.
Group: annotations
Used on these elements
may be used on nodesmay be used on waysmay be used on areas (and multipolygon relations)may be used on relations
See also
Status: de facto

This key identifies the license of an individual feature in OpenHistoricalMap. Some features have been contributed under a different license than the database as a whole, which may require extra care on the part of data consumers. Any feature without this key is presumed to be in the public domain through the project's public domain dedication.

History

Historically, OpenHistoricalMap did not adopt a uniform license for the database and its contents. Instead, individual mappers contributed individual features under disparate licenses of their choosing. This led to confusion about how OHM data could be used while satisfying these licenses, not to mention difficult questions about how features under incompatible licenses could coexist within the same database.

On August 3, 2022, OpenHistoricalMap adopted Creative Commons Zero (CC0), dedicating the database to the public domain to the extent possible, unless otherwise specified by a license=* tag. [1] It remains possible to contribute data under copyright, but the project now strongly encourages releasing new contributions into the public domain.

In February 2023, an import of bus stops in Belgium came with licence=* tags, making that spelling 25% more popular than license=*.

How to map

Add license=* to each element that has any other tag on it. It is presumed that a way's license=* tag also applies to untagged nodes along the way, and that a relation's license=* tag also applies to untagged ways that are members of the relation, as these untagged features only exist for the purpose of defining the tagged feature's geometry.

Common values

As of May 2023, 60% of explicitly tagged features are licensed under CC0, which simply reaffirms the project's decision to use a public domain dedication by default. Some other values, such as CC0 / public domain and copyright expired, bring the share of public domain data to 71% of all explicitly tagged features. The next most common licenses are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and ODbL at 9% apiece. (The ODbL generally identifies data imported from OpenStreetMap.) No other license reaches half a percent of license=* usage.

Note that these statistics are limited to features with explicit license=* tags, which are only 0.02% of all features in OpenHistoricalMap.

See also

External links