Mapping Hacks

Sean Dodson’s latest article in the Guardian, entitled Get
Mapping, features the counterpoint between commercial and amateur (or
civil) cartography:

It is tempting to call it the march of amateur mapmakers: armed with cheap
satellite-tracking handsets, teams of civilian surveyors are out in the field
recording casual journeys and sharing geodata with each other to produce their
own maps. Their aim is to build a set of people’s maps: charted and owned by
those who create them, which are as free to share as the open road.

….

“There’s a huge issue of quality assurance,” says OS’s Scott Sinclair. “We make an average of 5,000 changes to the database every day. It’s very high quality data and someone has to pay for that. If you were to give that data away, you would have to change the business model and the only alternative would be a tax-funded model.”

There are two things wrong with Mr Sinclair’s statement, of course. The
first is the implication that funding public geodata infrastructure through
taxation is somehow bad, or unsuitable, when the overwhelming majority of
civic infrastructure, e.g. roads, bridges, hospitals, etc. etc. are often
funded that way, and frequently quite successfully so. The second is the
suggestion that there could only be one alternative to the Ordinance Survey’s
business model of maintaing geospatial data in exchange for rapacious
licensing fees — clearly, Mr Sinclair has never heard of Wikipedia!

Posted in press |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.