concur, I see a lot more room for maneuvers at the local government level releasing geodata from the bottom up.
in the uk, the ordnance survey itself is a downstream consumer of change notification from local councils, on roads and buildings, and those same local councils are licensing from the OS. they have a lot of interest in closing that loop through freely available tools, and as a byproduct releasing that data into the public domain. of course, reliability becomes a big issue once in treads into this level of usage. ----- Original Message ---- From: Jo Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 11:47:44 PM Subject: Re: [geo-discuss] Free geo-data: what next? dear Dan, Malte, all, On Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 12:15:33PM +0100, Malte Halbey-Martin wrote: > unfree geodata are unacceptable for me! > So, can we do soemthing about it anymore or do we have to resign? No-one has to resign themselves to anything :) As Rufus pointed out, INSPIRE has yet to be transposed into national law; there will be opportunities to affect legislation there, and to connect with local agencies using and producing geodata ... The activities of publicgeodata.org have been INSPIRE- and Europe- oriented from the get-go, though, so where do we take it from here? Over 7000 people signed the petition, from every member state of Europe. If national mailing lists or websites are started or are picking up momentum, we can email all these people. I would like to be able to extend an offer of hosting facilities through the OKFN, if needed. I think that in France and Germany in particular there are active groups. There's also a broad representation across Europe on the freegis.org list, and that would be a good place to connect through. There are local chapters of the OSGeo foundation starting up in some places, which will provide a connection to small business, local government and academic users as well as an existing remit to promote the availability of and access to open geographic data. It would be great to be able to provide a reference point for local groups working towards more open access to geodata, open standards, open source. There is a lot to be done practically, a ton of work on catalog services, metadata search and "ontology integration" in particular. There is a lot of data actually out there being published by different agencies that are not at a National Mapping Agency level, available behind OGC web services just waiting to be polled and indexed and help to provide a leading example of what can be done with what can be found. There is the opportunity to get involved in the implementing rules drafting phase, this is where what metadata is obliged to be published, is decided, and i will try to find out more about this and whether OSGeo could be an appropriate vehicle. On Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 04:41:03PM +0000, Dan wrote: > Now, there must be other cases in the voluntary and community sector. Can we > collect them and store them somewhere? We can then go to people in power and > say, 'look what the current state of affairs doesn't allow - it's madness, and > it puts the voluntary and community sectors at a great disadvantage in > comparison to wealthy organisations.' It would be great to write 'user stories' especially if they are accompanied by hard numbers about licensing costs and what is being impeded. The software patents campaign did well by collecting a lot of testimonies, though there was an emphasis for political reasons on small business user stories. It is a kind of catch-22 situation where we can't effectively demonstrate innovation and cost savings without already being in the situation we are arguing should exist. MySociety have made some inroads here by working into a position of trust and getting limited use access to some data sets to do proof of concept demonstrations (I think they got to play with the NLIS data) and they are frequently looking for interesting ideas and for volunteer code contributions: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/maps Meanwhile http://openstreetmap.org/ really is starting to fill out well. I have heard that in one borough the local council was donating bicycle route data to them, data that the SDI doesn't want and of course doesn't appear on the commercially produced maps. There is a way to go - and the postcode situation is going to be awhile in resolving - but it really is looking viable to provide a collaborative map free of restrictions on reuse. The open source geospatial toolset is getting easier to use, better documented. I really want to see a sandbox project, working with a local authority or a decent sized not-for-profit to replace its spatial data storage and search systems, and provide better working web services for related systems - one could get commercial sponsorship to do this (think 'GoogleGov') ... In the US one sees things like http://www.metrogis.org/ which is a data-sharing arrangement between a lot of local government agencies. Federations of networking arrangements like these rather obviate the need for a National Spatial Data Infrastructure, with gateways via OGC web services, and the raw metadata being open to the internet, not hidden behind search services; that's the way it should be going, right? > 2. I'm just starting a PhD at Leeds Geog dept; I'm going to be creating > java-based local economy mapping apps - again, geo-data will be vital to make > it useable. I say this coz I'm wondering quite how I can direct my energies to > help this campaign. What's next? If I wanted to try and get some support in > the > department for, say, a lobbying exercise, what angle should I take? Can we > form > a national position and provide some docs for folk like me to download, and > use > to harrass their departments? We can certainly try :) Up to this point Rufus has had some contact and correspondance with people at Defra; i don't know if they will be responsible for the eventual translation of INSPIRE into UK law (it was their problem in Europe because it's ostensibly about environmental data; we are waiting for the annexes to the Directive to see what geodata sets it will really cover). The Ordnance Survey advised them what position to take, but the OS is ostensibly overseen by the DCLG. That is about all I know, it would be a question of everyone winging it together and writing down what worked on the wiki. One organisation that could be helpful here is the Open Rights Group - they were founded as a 'clearinghouse' for digital rights interest groups of different kinds in the UK and could help out with media-friendliness, etc - http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ As for a 'national position', i'm not sure i would dare try to articulate one :) http://okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php is a statement of the basic criteria and reasoning behind open geodata. Its signup system is switched off due to spam, I will upgrade it really soon and plan to redirect people from petition.publicgeodata.org to there. Right now the wiki contains links to a few case studies in support of open access to geodata. I think some more of Rufus' and Giles' recent writings should be linked from there. A good library of supporting material and references is something OSGeo should be helping to put together as well. I have held off from changing the front page of the wiki because i want to see the Directive first, you know? and it could be fun to do a wiki analysis of the final text. I hope this makes sense. There are a lot of potential angles, there is only so much energy. Awareness is greater now and the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign is doing a lot of good PR work (though their take-it-all-back-into-state-hands-tax-funded solution in my view is not future-viable and unhelpfully polarises the debate into the OS's terms... but i shouldn't complain! That anyone would deem INSPIRE worthy of coverage has been amazing to me.) One thing I want to do is have another open geodata event. On March 17th a one-day event is planned which will cover open access to civic information, scientific data, geodata, and open media... this isn't definite yet, i think. Tomorrow (Tuesday) evening there's an Open Knowledge Forum on Civic Information ( http://www.okfn.org/okforums/civicinfo2/ ) which as usual has a geo crossover moment (scraping planning information). The first Open Geodata Forum was well-attended and we can consider doing another. Cheers for your enthusiasm and sorry this turned into a bit of a rant, jo _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
