Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, May 12, 2006

OA maps in the UK, the continuing struggle

Steve Mathieson, A sidestep in the right direction, The Guardian, May 11, 2006. Excerpt:

[Damian] Steer is taking part in an attempt to map the Isle of Wight's roads in one weekend for OpenStreetMap.org, a website that helps create maps free for anyone to use for any purpose. If Ordnance Survey [OS] and other national agencies will not make their data freely available, then OpenStreetMap, developed over the past two years, will re-collect it from scratch.

The weekend drew around 40 people. By Monday, OpenStreetMap's founder Steve Coast estimated that more than 90% of the island's roads had been recorded. When asked if volunteers used OS maps, Coast says: "No. It's a taboo." Someone who did pull out an OS map was told to put it away immediately.  Instead, Coast distributed older, out-of-copyright maps to aid navigation. [Although publicly-funded,] OS maps are covered by Crown copyright, which lasts 50 years from the end of the year of publication....

But OS has all [the geospatial information] up to date, so wouldn't it be better to campaign for OS to open up its data rather than rebuild it? "Freeing certain scales of data would be good, but the best way to make it happen [is] to go and do it," replies Coast. "There's no reason for OS to [free the data] because it has a monopoly. There's no economic incentive - until we produce one."

OpenStreetMap's aim is to produce maps such as that for Weybridge where someone using the name 80n has turned GPS tracings and research into a fairly detailed map of the town. Next weekend OpenStreetMap will attempt to map the centre of Manchester, with the aim of producing a free-to-use map of venues for the city's Futuresonic 2006 arts festival in July. "They can't get it from OS without spending vast amounts of money," says Coast. The "Mapchester" event is getting space and support from Manchester Digital Development Agency, a public-sector organisation. "We very much endorse it," says Dave Carter, its head. "We see it as a map version of open source. It might not work, but ... we're funded to promote innovative research and development, which is why we're supporting this."

Charles Arthur puts this in perspective on the FreeOurData blog:

Is it only me who finds it faintly ridiculous that a public sector organisation is endorsing a public movement to create open-source maps for the public’s use when there’s already a public sector organisation that creates very good maps - but which neither the other public sector organisation or the public wants to tangle with?

Comment. This is fascinating. A taxpayer-supported agency of the UK government collects high-quality map data, which it sells to the public rather than giving away. OA activists are volunteering their labor and time to make high-quality maps of their own, and giving them away, in order to compete with the publicly-funded, government-sold maps. It should shame the UK government that this is even happening. But the activists are thinking that economic pressure is more powerful than shame, and maybe it is. Will it free up publicly-funded mapping data in the UK? Stay tuned.