Emlyn Williams is mystified: why doesn’t his house show up on satellite navigation systems? It was built in 1988, and he moved there in 1996, yet from time to time delivery drivers complain that they can’t find it....So what is going on?...The Williams house’s apparent invisibility is caused by the eagerness of the Post Office and Ordnance Survey (OS) to sell their postcode and geographic address data sets respectively. That wouldn’t happen if both provided their data free, as the Guardian Technology Free Our Data campaign argues they should....[W]hy don’t all in-car navigation systems use the data collected by the UK’s mapping agency? Because it’s expensive....
I've omitted most of the details from this long, depressing story, but only because Arthur has posted a short version to Free Our Data: the blog this morning. Excerpt:
Why can’t [delivery services using satellite navigation systems] find [Williams' house]? Because although local councils create the address information, which they send to the Post Office, which sends it to the Ordnance Survey (which “puts it on the map”), satellite navigation companies can’t always afford the OS prices. And councils are barred from selling the location data to satnav companies - because they use OS products to record any changes. (We’ve got council minutes.) Which means that in order to save some small sums for the taxpayer, by making OS revenue-neutral, taxpayers have to bear the extra congestion and pollution caused by drivers trying to find locations, while satnav systems’ prices are either kept artificially high, or are inadequate. The data’s all there, recorded by public bodies. Who are we “protecting” by charging so much for it?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/20/2006 08:38:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
