There’s been a lot of positive rumblings coming from government recently about open and linked data. One of them is a consultation about the future of the Ordnance Survey, and in particular, a proposal to release a number of existing OS products for use at no charge under a CC-By license. This is Section 7, and the part of the consultation I want to focus on right now.
From Section 7:
Ordnance Survey Free is intended to allow communities to combine (or “mash-up”) government data about their community and environment from a number of sources and illustrate their findings in a geographic context:
• the raster products will enable developers to produce an application that overlays their information on a map and to zoom-in from a national view with MiniScale® down to the street level with OS Street View®
• the gazetteer, boundary and postcode information will enable widespread use of these commonly used geographies and it will act as a link between other government data sets which reference the same geography
• the 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer provides a definitive source of town and place names to search and locate a place of interest on the map; Code-Point® provides the location of every postcode to enable accurate search and display of specific locations and it will link to other data with a postcode reference
• Boundary-LineTM provides the outline and a unique reference to all the administrative and electoral units of Great Britain
• MeridianTM 2 and Strategi® are small scale vector products which provide the geometry of features to allow customisation and combination with other data. MeridianTM 2 includes a full named and attributed road network.
It is Code-Point and Boundary-Line which I feel are the most import data sets to make freely available.
In our democracy, with a First Past the Post electoral system, which is supposed to provide a strong link between citizen and representative, the fact that today, the Boundary-Line dataset is private, and not free-for-use by any citizen is astonishing. I struggle to believe that Boundary-Line is commercially significant to the OS, or alternatively that the majority of licensees are not public bodies*. Releasing Code-Point would increase the value of a Boundary-Line release significantly, allowing correlation of post-code and administrative region. With Post Codes as the primary location identifier in every day use, building services on top of Boundary-Line without Code-Point would be really tricky.
I’m sure that there are similar arguments for the other sets suggested, but I think Boundary-Line and Code-Point are a crucial and clear starting point.
Another portion of Section 7 asks how these OS Free products should be delivered (Web App, Download, Web API, DVD priced at/near cost). To which I can only respond… yes! The Boundary-Line and Code-Point information should be made accessible as Linked Data along the lines of the data.gov.uk projects, providing a Web API. It should also be made available as an easily downloaded data set, and a simple Web App would be very easy to produce. The other data sets (which include graphical tiles) are a more difficult area, but wouldn’t advocate that OS should compete with Google Maps or Bing Maps. The OS can probably learn from OpenStreetMap from the way they share their large data sets.
The consultation runs until mid March, and I’m still considering how comprehensive a response to write, given the chances of a change in Government, and hence that chances the consultation will be ignored.
* Taking data from [1] and [2], for 2008/09, over all OS products, it appears that about 42% of OS revenue came from Central and Local Government.
[1] http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/costs_to_central_and_local_gover#incoming-52363
[2] http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/aboutus/reports/annualreport/08-09/docs/accounts-2008-09.pdf
0 Responses to “Ordnance Survey Free”