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Creating an open database of wifi and cell networks all over the world

crowdflow.net

1–10 of 21 posts

Re: Creating an open database of wifi and cell networks all over the world

#4
post #3

Sorry... http://wigle.net/

WiGLE is awesome.. but they are not completely open. Subsections of the DB will be if you use JiGLE or scrape it piece by piece over time.. and you can always do selective queries, but the entirety of the database is not freely available.

.. nor is it currently available from crowdflow at the moment (although it is in their stated goals). They also only accept consolidated.db uploads at the present.

Re: Creating an open database of wifi and cell networks all over the world

#6
post #5

http://geomena.org does this too, with a creative commons license. Firefox can be configured to use Geomena as the geolocation provider (instead of google).

This looks like a nice project. I wish the Android client was available in the market or at least for download as .apk

Also a map would nice to see the current status of the whole database.

Re: Creating an open database of wifi and cell networks all over the world

#9
The problem with Crowdflow is the way they get the data. Instead of collecting their own data using GPS, WiFi SSIDs and Cell Tower IDs they ask users to submit their iPhone location data cache. This cache is filled from Apple's own location database and from the Skyhook database. So they are, in a way, scraping data from those two databases, which will probably lead to licensing issues.

Now, if there were an open database (open as in I can download it for my own use, not just query it via an API) for WiFi network GPS coordinates and Cell Tower ID GPS coordinates that would collect its data by letting contributors run a simple iPhone or Android app, that would be awesome.

Re: Creating an open database of wifi and cell networks all over the world

#10
post #9

The problem with Crowdflow is the way they get the data. Instead of collecting their own data using GPS, WiFi SSIDs and Cell Tower IDs they ask users to submit their iPhone location data cache. This cache is filled from Apple's own location database and from the Skyhook database. So they are, in a way, scraping data from those two databases, which will probably lead to licensing issues. Now, if there were an open dat…

What licensing issues? It's your phone, your data. I don't think Apple gets to say what you get to do with your data on your phone. If it was on Apple's servers, maybe they would have a case.

Plus, it's data that Apple shouldn't have been storing (in its current state, anyway) in the first place.

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