Mapping Hacks

I’m always thrilled to see mainstream coverage of open geodata issues, and yesterday’s article in the Guardian, Give us back our crown jewels, is a good read. It talks a lot about the Ordnance Survey’s holdings of geographic data being held back from the public via the archaic mechanism of Crown Copyright.

The article quotes a couple of the same research studies that are being used as support material for the Public Geodata campaign to raise awareness of what’s wrong with the INSPIRE Directive on european spatial data infrastructure, which in its current form threatens to entrench the short-termist monopoly pricing policy over geographic information collected by the public sector. The Guardian article points at the classic Peter Weiss paper, Borders in Cyberspace, comparing the positive economic effects of US policy of providing free or very low cost access to public data to the public, to the more protectionist European policy.

It’s great to see more agitation against Crown Copyright and the way it is used to guarantee short-term profit at the expense of future economic value, coming from different sources. The open geodata scene in the UK is making a lot of noise, and projects that have originated there quickly gather a lot of pan-European traction. The publicgeodata petition provides an interesting overview of which European states’ citizens are really hurting as a result of proprietary, copyright oriented policies over public geographic data; a lot of signatories based in Italy, in Spain and in Germany. In order to convince MEPs that state collected geodata is public property, and that it can create exponentially more economic and social value if provided openly, than when restricted by a monopoly pricing and licensing policy, we need to get more pan-European signups, and to get more people writing to their MEPs, explaining the strong arguments in favour of open geodata policy.

Back in the UK, Steve Coast of openstreetmap recently started an open geodata blog where he’s writing about efforts to build open licensed geographic data from the ground up, a crucial parallel effort to lobbying our representatives who are working from the top down. New web-based technologies that allow citizens and enterprises to contribute to the maintenance of national mapping data are just starting to look viable; the efforts can meet in the middle, producing more accurate, more meaningful, more timely and accessible data for everyone. It would be a rosy picture, if the INSPIRE directive wasn’t threatening to entrench a monopoly pricing and data access restriction policy from such a great height.

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