Mapping Hacks

On June 6th, the INSPIRE Directive goes into the European Parliament for its first reading. This is a Directive that will establish a legal and technical framework for a European spatial data infrastructure.

I suppose one could view this in the way the French have viewed the European Constitution. Too much effort, says the ‘pro’ side, has gone into building what we have, to throw it away; INSPIRE rests on the ashes of the GI2000 initiative that died when the last European Commission resigned en masse in 1999; great consultancy and resourcing programmes have been thrown up around it; too much of the rest of the policy base depends on it.

There are great flaws in INSPIRE, as there are in the Constitution; and resting too great a power on this one unelected, unaccountable body is the greatest. Article 24 of the INSPIRE directive gives the Commission power to establish a common licensing and pricing policy for European spatial data at a time of its choosing, with no democratic consultation, backed by its committee of National Mapping Agency representatives.

I wrote to my MEP using the excellent WriteToThem service available in the UK. Type in your postal code, and get back a list of your local, state and euro elected representatives; you can use the email->fax gateway to send them a message straight away.

This service was built by a charitable organisation called MySociety. To power it, they needed among other things a way of translating postal codes into location co-ordinates, and a shape for each administrative district in the UK, to identify what areas a point falls within. They’ve had to beg and borrow access to this spatial data, through peppercorn licensing agreements in partnership with academic and local authority bodies. MySociety have done some interesting things with their small pot of central-government-for-local-government funding; it’s arguable that a lot of them could have been done in the public domain, on no funded basis at all, were the data publically accessible and free of punitive cost.

There are many reasons, technical, civic and emotive, why global access to state-collected information should work more like it does now in the US - free of cost, simple standards, raw machine-readable documents, published by default rather than by supplication. The Eurospatial Cartel outlined a shopping-list of what’s possible; a few points about what’s wrong with INSPIRE might help in composing a letter to an MEP. There are still a few days left; it’s worth contacting your MEP while the vote is scheduled soon. If the first reading passes, INSPIRE will become law as fully expected, and lobbying for change in geodata policy, at national and international level in Europe, will become a lot harder.

Posted in policy |

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.