Mapping Hacks

The recent UK Geospatial Mashups event hosted by the Ordnance Survey provoked in me some reflections on business models for the production of open geodata which I have belatedly written down.

It was good to see old friends at the event - Mikel holding it up for GeoRSS, Raj on the stump for the new WFS-basic effort (a simplified web transfer protocol for geographic shapes), Steve showing off OpenStreetmap’s latest progress in client applications and their phenomenal mapping parties; Chris Lightfoot on the analysis prototypes done under the auspices of MySociety.

The data licensing question lurked unspoken all day, an enormous pink elephant almost filling the room. It was a brave move for the Ordnance Survey to invite so many proponents of community-driven, open access data production efforts into their space, and a recognition I hope of a future direction.

I hear an awful lot of rumblings. Giles Lane writes of a new case study on the Ordnance Survey in the context of “intellectual property” and the public domain, published by the IPPR (part, I think, of the same series as Rufus Pollock’s paper on The Value of the Public Domain, which contains a positive economic treatment of the benefits of open public access to geodata). Giles’ “Modest Proposal” is to make available the National Geographic Database at no more than the cost of reproduction.

Meanwhile, Mikel writes to the OpenStreetmap legal-talk list that the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) will end on 31st December 2006. NIMSA currently subsidises the activities of the Ordnance Survey, with an emphasis on the mapping of “uneconomic areas” and the provision of geodata in emergency/disaster situations. A cut-down version of NIMSA’s remit will, it is indicated, be put out for commercial tender by “public sector bodies”. With NIMSA gone then OS really will receive no directly allocated taxpayer funding, but one of the core arguments for its existence - to provide UK wide mapping whatever social and commercial disparity between the places mapped - may be eroded.

The indefatigable Charles Arthur writes this week in the Guardian that “From postcodes to roads, we can collect it all.” A big telemetry company talks of contributing much “drive-by data” to a “People’s Map” project. The New Popular Edition Map is approximately the last complete out-of-copyright set of UK wide OS maps from the early 50s’ which I am so happy to see Richard Fairhurst has got out onto the web at last. It’s now being used as an complement to the Free The Postcode effort - if you don’t have a GPS, try and approximately locate your postcode on this out of copyright map, safe in the knowledge that you have the right to make all manner of derivative works.
Charles is also keeping an eye on the proposed INSPIRE directive establishing a spatial data infrastructure in Europe, urging us to remember, remember the 21st of November as this will be a big day for the prospects of public access to geodata in Europe - the deadline for a Third Reading of a compromise directive in the European Parliament. (Let us hope that a clause guaranteeing the public’s right to view and to access all metadata about state-collected geographic information persists into the version of the Directive that appears in the EP.) He ends,

What’s needed is an OS which delights in getting the best data possible for everyone, and making it available for everyone who has paid for it - which would be all of us, through our taxes.

This sounds like a different kind of National Mapping Agency altogether, rather than the current agency in a different role. I’ve held that how INSPIRE is constructed and was consulted, was very much framed by the requirements of “traditional”, heavily centralised and proprietary-oriented NMAs. But in open source / standards / data, status quo changes before the legislative framework has a chance to catch up…

Posted in geodata, collaborative mapping, policy, open knowledge |

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