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Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

309 点作者 spenrose超过 11 年前

17 条评论

dewitt超过 11 年前
FWIW, Google doesn&#x27;t particularly like it when people use APIs outside the terms, either. Having to take down an app is never fun or enjoyable for anyone involved. And the cases in which the terms aren&#x27;t programmatically enforced right away isn&#x27;t necessarily a choice; often it is difficult to differentiate at scale between legitimate usage and disallowed usage.<p>And while I don&#x27;t know how every other company writes their developer Terms of Services, I do know that in Google&#x27;s case we measure each word carefully and try hard to strike the right balance between offering as much as feasibly possible, while trying to create something long-term sustainable (so even if the usage grows far beyond our initial goals, we&#x27;re still in a position to keep them available). We&#x27;re hardly perfect at it yet, but we&#x27;re certainly getting a lot better over time.<p>Also worth noting, often times these terms are designed to honor upstream data contracts, so if for no other reason, it&#x27;s worth trying to respect them because it&#x27;s the right thing to do for the other relatively small parties, too.
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TallGuyShort超过 11 年前
Here&#x27;s another reason that I wish was more prevalently discussed: it&#x27;s not okay to violate Terms of Service anyway. Don&#x27;t accept the terms? Don&#x27;t use the service. We&#x27;d all have a field day if &quot;big brother&quot; violated the terms of an open-source license, but the freedom we enjoy in the community comes with a responsibility to honor our agreements.
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blackmad超过 11 年前
I&#x27;ve been meaning to put together a more technical blog post about the various geo pieces that we&#x27;ve released at foursquare. But for now, here&#x27;s one that&#x27;s an overview of the things we&#x27;ve been working on: <a href="http://engineering.foursquare.com/2013/06/11/quattroshapes-a-global-polygon-gazetteer-from-foursquare/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;engineering.foursquare.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;11&#x2F;quattroshapes-a...</a><p>The biggest piece is <a href="http://twofishes.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twofishes.net&#x2F;</a>, our coarse (city&#x2F;neighborhood level) geocoder based on geonames data. It also serves as our coarse reverse geocoder when we combine it with polygon data, which we&#x27;ve released at <a href="http://quattroshapes.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;quattroshapes.com&#x2F;</a>, as a combination of open government data and synthesized data.<p><a href="http://zetashapes.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zetashapes.com&#x2F;</a> is a side project of ours, where we&#x27;re seeing if people want to draw their own crowdsourced neighborhood boundaries in US by coloring in a map of basically city blocks.<p>I&#x27;m always eager to chat about open geodata as well as complimentary commercial solutions.
jacalata超过 11 年前
His site <a href="http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datasciencetoolkit.org&#x2F;</a> certainly looks interesting! One of the most impressive kinds of arguments - &quot;I think you should stop doing x and here are the resources y I&#x27;ve created&#x2F;curated to make it easier for you to do so.&quot;
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ubasu超过 11 年前
From the article: &quot;I’m not RMS, I love open-source for very pragmatic reasons. One of the biggest is that I hate hitting black boxes when I’m debugging!&quot;<p>RMS started the free software movement because he wasn&#x27;t able to adapt a black box printer.
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ChuckMcM超过 11 年前
I wonder how much of this is an outgrowth of &#x27;hackathon culture&#x27; which is to say &quot;Hey we can do this thing ...&quot; and get to some demo without having the foundation bits worked out. (or more importantly the future foundation bits).<p>There are a lot of people who used to make &#x27;kit cars&#x27; which was they took a VW bug chassis, removed the bodywork, and installed some fiberglass body on it. Really &quot;cool&quot; looking sports cars. But you couldn&#x27;t really say &quot;We&#x27;re going to be the next Porsche selling our new &quot;Wangdingo&quot; sports car which, as it turns out, is a fiberglass body on top of a VW bug chassis. The difference between kids making a prototype which looks cool (professional even, some of these cars were really really nice) but as a &#x27;new car&#x27; it was always a cheat since the other bits weren&#x27;t engineered, they were &#x27;acquired&#x27; and outside the plans of the original engineers for the chassis. Compared to the &#x27;motorhome&#x27; business where the company buys a Chassis from Ford or Chevy <i>as a chassis to build a new vehicle on.</i><p>Makes for an interesting conundrum. You can fail fast and iterate prototyping like this, and you can arrive at a saleable product for which there is no route to production because the underlying tech you rely on cannot be used &#x27;legally&#x27; the way you want to use it, and the amount of money the product might conceivably generate is less than the cost of re-creating the crucial bit of technology from scratch.
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jimmyrocks超过 11 年前
If you&#x27;re looking for elevation data, the USGS provides this for free for the US.<p>Example: <a href="http://gisdata.usgs.gov/xmlwebservices2/elevation_service.asmx/getElevation?X_Value=-104.88938886666669&amp;Y_Value=39.59397308786357&amp;Elevation_Units=feet&amp;Elevation_Only=&amp;Source_Layer=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gisdata.usgs.gov&#x2F;xmlwebservices2&#x2F;elevation_service.as...</a>
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nucleardog超过 11 年前
Here&#x27;s my problem:<p>1. The TOS aren&#x27;t heavily enforced; thus 2. No one I work for cares about complying with the TOS; thus 3. No one is particularly supportive of my spending additional time to work within the TOS.<p>Using and contributing work time or resources to an open source project is going to be a hard sell until there is some pressure on the business end to change. Having our data sources cut off, or having to reimplement on different providers would help.
Sukotto超过 11 年前
[Edit to add] Yes, you&#x27;re right. When I compare their map side-by-side the same area in maps.google.com they are clearly different. I should have looked more carefully before asking my question.<p>So I guess my question <i>should</i> be &quot;If they had the exact same page except using a Google map, would they be in compliance?&quot;<p>-<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me in what way the &quot;Crime doesn&#x27;t climb&quot; page violates the quoted terms of use. Would someone please explain it to me?<p><pre><code> The Elevation API may only be used in conjunction with displaying results on a Google map; using elevation data without displaying a map for which elevation data was requested is prohibited. </code></pre> They used the API to display results on a Google map.<p>Their site used the elevation data to display a map for which elevation data was requested.<p>-<p>I&#x27;m not being facetious. It seems to me that their use matches the requirements. So what exactly is the problem?
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iamleppert超过 11 年前
It&#x27;s rate limited for a reason and every other so called &quot;better alternative&quot; will have some sort of limitations in place, if they want to stay in business. Nothing is for free. By saying people will just magically make a free, unlimited API service as long as people stop using Google&#x27;s is dumb.
chatman超过 11 年前
Everyone should try OpenStreetMap based APIs, e.g. MapQuest Open.
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nraynaud超过 11 年前
just to clear up a misconception, the SRTM is just unusable in it&#x27;s normal form, you need a lot of time to clean it up and cross it with other sources. This guy does a lot of curation: <a href="http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.viewfinderpanoramas.org&#x2F;dem3.html</a><p>(and I also suck google&#x27;s elevation data for a test because that&#x27;s the simplest way to do it: <a href="http://nraynaud.github.io/webgcode/test_threejs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nraynaud.github.io&#x2F;webgcode&#x2F;test_threejs.html</a> )
javajosh超过 11 年前
Okay, so I have a question: how can open source geocoding services sustain themselves? Doesn&#x27;t it cost money to gather all of that data? Where does that money come from if the service is free? I would expect an OSS geocoding service to be a) seeded with data that is out of copyright (basic geography and placenames, b) spruced up with any well-regarded modern free datasources (probably government funded), c) spruced up even more from volunteers donating GPS data.<p>Would a geocoding service be a good candidate for a state-run utility?
tegansnyder超过 11 年前
If you are looking for a good mapping alternate checkout Leaflet.js. You can load from a variety of tile servers. I think a while back someone had a tutorial an setting up your own tile server on AWS. Actually <a href="http://tiledrawer.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiledrawer.com&#x2F;</a> provides a base AMI. Another good commercial solution for geocoding is <a href="http://smartystreets.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;smartystreets.com&#x2F;</a> if you need to do batch processing.
timClicks超过 11 年前
Does anyone know of a good guide to DEM (Digital Elevation Model) formats? New Zealand has some great open data[0], and I expect that it would be a fun exercise to create your own elevation API from it but I don&#x27;t know how to get started<p>[0] <a href="http://koordinates.com/#/layer/1418-nz-80m-digital-elevation-model/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;koordinates.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;layer&#x2F;1418-nz-80m-digital-elevation...</a>
jetd超过 11 年前
I have one comment and one question.<p>Q: Are OSM&#x2F;Nominatim good for most countries now? When I tried it was very good to good enough for developed countries like US or UK but for others clearly not.<p>C: I really dont get Google mindset. They sell geoservices. OK. How much money that would bring 1mil, 10mil or 100mil in over 20bil company. What is the logic? Creating barriers? I dont know.
lhnz超过 11 年前
You would have thought San Francisco&#x27;s crime rate would have been higher with all of these unauthorised API usages... (Yep, the data was pirated by a guy in San Francisco. Ironic.)