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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ireland frees up some public data

Free O’Data: Ireland makes (some) data free, Free Our Data: the blog, November 26, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Ireland’s geographical agency, the GSI, has made a number of its datasets about boreholes available for free online.

Announced by the minister, the web page itself is a bit spartan: “Minister Ryan launches Spatial Data Projects to allow free online access to Departmental data. GSI, along with PAD, EMD and Engineering Divisions of DCENR, all contributed data to these series of web map viewers, data download pages and GIS web services. Click on www.dcenr.gov.ie/spatial+pages [Note: this isn’t a valid page, or at least not to me on my Mac] or http://www.gsi.ie/mapping for further details.” ...

An interesting contrast with the Environment Agency for England and Wales, which as we pointed out in May, is trying to charge people for details about water extraction locations....