Open Access News

Last week, I asked my friend Norm Vine, a stalwart of the open source GIS community, if he could introduce me to someone at the U.S. Geological Survey who might be prepared to make a public statement about public access to national mapping data being a good thing for the national economy. He seemed genuinely perplexed for a moment, as if I'd just asked him to put me in touch with a fish that might be prepared to make a public statement on how water is a good thing for the marine ecology. In the U.S., public access to geographic data, "geodata" for short, has always been taken for granted as being part of the national heritage. Norm suggested that in the U.S., one of the reasons to have a government is to have good map data. George Washington himself was a surveyor and mapmaker. The interior of the North American continent was unknown to the colonists. In order to establish autonomy in the face of the colonial powers, they had to create and share accurate spatial models of where they were. At that time, Europe was gripped by bitter feuds over scarce but well-mapped resources. Quarrels resulted in attempts to gain access to the external resources vital to victory....Philip II kept the national maps of Spain under lock and key. Maps were powerful military technologies for both attack and defense, and thus were kept as military secrets. The British Empire published its maps openly and they were reprinted widely. When you look at the modern maps of Newfoundland, of the whole North American Eastern Seaboard, it is the British-applied names that have stayed with us to the present day....Sharing geographic data across borders is a keystone in the European effort to collaboratively manage resources, create fairer governance structures and contribute to each others' economic prosperity. The national mapping agencies (NMA) of Europe sometimes seem to be living in the colonial past. Public geodata are kept under lock and key, through copyright and commercial licensing terms that are prohibitive to ordinary citizens and spare-time, free-software enthusiasts who want to undertake amateur GIS projects. Europe's governing agencies, especially those that collect census information and manage resource networks, find it hard to cooperate....The proposed INSPIRE Directive (press release) on establishing a common spatial data infrastructure in Europe is the latest and greatest in a long series of initiatives undertaken by NMA representatives to fix some of these problems. INSPIRE aims to establish common standards for describing the physical world and the things in it, and to establish a framework across which different agencies that collect data can share data with one another. A common framework is something that Europe badly needs to maintain integrity....Each time the INSPIRE Directive draft has gone to a new stage in the co-decision process, the thematic types of data that it covers decrease; therefore the options that the public will have to even view images of geodata, let alone get access to them and work with them in their own GISs, are decreasing. The second version of the INSPIRE Directive has a new emphasis on protecting the intellectual property rights of the agencies that collect and distribute public geodata....As Europe moves into the 21st century, it needs to design a common spatial data infrastructure that works for all of its citizens. INSPIRE is not that infrastructure. The NMAs that designed it are quite rightly fearful for their role, with increasingly viable commercial alternatives to the data they collect and provide on the one hand, and government pressure to privatize formerly state-owned information infrastructure and gain short term profit from it, on the other. INSPIRE does not reflect the full debate around, or the full potential in, spatial data infrastructure as a tremendous engine of research innovation, new kinds of economic activity, and a reformed practice of civic engineering. So far the debate has been largely polarized between "information wants to be free!" and "you get what you pay for!" There are plenty of alternative models that can exist....Many European academics, researchers, small business persons and open source software developers are crying out for public access to the geodata that describe their world. They offer many new and accurate insights into how Europe can overcome the description problems inherent in having 25 different spatial models in as many different languages. I started talking about this with Norm Vine, because I've been working with Benjamin Henrion of the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructures. Henrion worked hard to roll back the Software Patents Directive that would have put the brakes on the potential for small businesses and academics in Europe to create their own software. Henrion and I are putting together a wiki website at which people can: learn more about the history of INSPIRE; find out how to get involved in the lobbying process; find others who consider INSPIRE to be designed without proper public consultation and without consideration for the negative economic and social effects that it may have. We've also started a public petition to give to members of the European Parliament. We’re urging them to look again at what must appear to most people outside of the geographic information industry to be a pretty obscure technical directive. But they underestimate the impact it will actually have on how Europe is managed and governed. If you're in Europe, please support this effort by signing the petition, talking to your non-GI friends about it and asking them to sign it too. If you're outside Europe, keep watching this space. The decisions made here and now about the next generation of spatial data infrastructure may impact your rights to get access to public geodata describing the world around you, and faster than you think.