A Call for Open Data Access in the UK

Roger Hart's GeoCarta blog has an entry today on a call by the Guardian Newspaper for Great Britain's mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, to make England's geospatial data freely available.

The entry, British Newspaper Bashes Ordinance Survey, quotes the newspaper at some length. It boils down to a very familiar argument: data is collected at taxpayer expense and should be freely available.

To that end, the Guardian has launched a new Campaign: Free Our Data.

The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies.

The Guardian goes on to point out a result of the US Government's more open model: the rise of many new businesses and new kinds of business (Google Maps and Earth, MSN's mapping offerings, MapQuest, etc.). Of course, all this commercial activity means more tax revenue. For the government.

Mr. Hart closes his post with a reminder that, while data is more freely available in the US, not all governments here are as open as they could be.

It may also be the case that these articles would support our lager goal of increasing and organizing a nationwide approach to funding the collecting and maintaining key data sets.