Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, January 24, 2006

More on OA to maps and map data

Jo Walsh, On the Society of Cartographers and Open Geodata (again), Mapping Hacks, January 21, 2006. Excerpt:
This morning i got a rare piece of snail-mail: production prints from this year's Society of Cartographers Bulletin, of the essay that i was honoured to contribute on the subject of Open Geodata, Free Software, and Civic Information. It talks about why we wrote "Mapping Hacks", and why UK based geo***kers are finding it hard to make interesting Google Maps hacks because of a lack of supporting culture of open access to state-collected geospatial information. I only got prints of my own article, but i know the bulletin contains pieces by Steve Coast about progress and plans for openstreetmap.org, and another by Richard Fairhurst of geowiki.co.uk on how he replaced a multi-million-pound proprietary GIS that used to run waterscape.com with a web map made in his free time using free software, that actually works better. The talk that Richard gave during the Society of Cartographers half-day session on Public Access to Maps/Data back in September, pretty much brought the house down.