dear all, If anyone else is in Brussels, I scheduled a BOF session on public geodata for EuroOSCON tomorrow evening (19th), 19:30 through 20:30: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/euos2006/view/e_sess/9793
I have no idea how many people will turn up; my sense of the conference so far is that it's pretty quiet, marketing-focused. I ran a similar BOF session at FOSS4G2006 last week, though this covered a lot of the OSGeo Public Geodata Committee stuff too (all sides; practical implementation of data exchange; licensing clarity; data repository planning; + the policy angle). It was well attended and more people were there with pragmatic questions about upfront open geodata licensing than any other topic there, i think. http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/FOSS4G_Public_Geodata_BOF The more people I talk to who *aren't* in the UK, the more positive sense I get; that the Council is in fact likely to back down; in which case the implementing rules phase really is going to be pushed ahead by open source GIS. Certainly at a local / municipal / departmental level there is a lot more data 'leaking out' - all the Spanish cadastral information via Web Feature Service, etc - it's just not being indexed and redistributed. The catalog/search specs are not answering the problem, and data providers seem to have this "well, you just need to look at the GetCapabilities" attitude - like putting a HTML file on a webserver but not linking to it or from it, and magically expecting Google to find it just because you told someone about it down the pub. But this will change soon. Having seen Benjamin briefly earlier, he says this Commission opinion / whitepaper / whatever it is is due for release in a couple of days and that would be a good opportunity to synchronise a press release. Interesting times - that perhaps it is not so bad from the inside as it looks from the outside. There's an INSPIRE related RFP which passed a couple of weeks ago and another one on its way for November - it probably makes sense to try to get into this loop - I wonder if Markus is already connected through the Open Source Geospatial SDIC. cheers, jo _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
