I was lucky enough to be able to attend the pre-OSCON meeting of FLOSS Foundations - a group of people too-intimately involved in the management of free and open source software foundations - representing OSGeo. I gave a short talk on the subject of why a free and open source software foundation finds itself engaging in open access to data efforts, through the nascent Open Geodata Committee within OSGeo, and why it matters so much to us. Here’s the writeup of my notes....
Why is a software foundation supporting open access to geodata activities? Partly because the domain demands data in order to do work....
There’s a gaping disparity in different countries regarding geodata in the public domain....Even if developers are hooked into local government data sharing agreements, they still have no freedom to redistribute those data sets with their packages.
As an independent free software developer with a bug in my head about open access to geodata, I had two potential strategies. I could run around talking to people with data holdings, and people working to gain access to those data holdings, figure out what legislation was holding them back, and try to raise awareness of the issues involved - thus OKFN Open Geodata efforts and PublicGeodata.org. Or I could run around with a GPS unit, share my tracks online and spend days painstakingly tracing and annotating free of copyright models of the world around me, contributing to OpenStreetmap.org....
Open source, open standards and open data are in this worldview a kind of triad, mutually reinforcing....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/02/2006 08:31:00 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.
