Yesterday, I wrote a rather sweary and ill-tempered blog post about the Ordnance Survey’s attempts to change its spots. Lets take a look at what exactly is vexing me about the Ordnance Survey, GeoVation and OpenSpaces.
The Problem – Derived Data
This year’s budget was the government’s chance to follow up on the Cabinet Office’s own findings:
There is a high demand for map-based public sector information services. But the complex and legalistic licensing and charging regime offered by the Ordnance Survey is acting as a barrier, both real and perceived, to innovation in this area…The taskforce judges that the charging and licencing regime stifles innovation in public service delivery and economic activity.
This is no radical, everything must be free open-source die hard saying this. It is the Cabinet Office, the ‘head office of governement’, saying that the Ordnance Survey must change its licensing regime. On the one hand we have OpenStreetMap, where the data is free and I can do pretty much anything I like with the data, and then we have the OS with large up-front license fees and straightjacket like restrictions. Back to the Cabinet Office’s findings:
one large local authority expressed bewilderment to the Task Force that the location data for its own street furniture seemed to be owned by the Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey often claims derived copyright in public service locations, often despite the original information coming from other public bodies.
Derived Data. The single most stifling element of the Ordnance Survey’s licensing regime is the practice of claiming copyright over any data derived from an OS base map. This has massive implications to anyone in a public sector body, or anyone who wishes to use their data. Any geographical data created by a public sector body (who almost exclusively use OS data) is not their’s to do what they like with, it is claimed by the Ordnance Survey under their copyright. Local authorities cannot share the location of its rubbish bins with the public, does this sound absurd to anybody else? Derived Data stops dead any effective sharing of public geographic data, and any innovation that would come from it.
The Response
With large institutions change is slow, the budget and trading fund review gave the OS 12 months to reassess the way they operate and come up with some answers. And sure enough, in May the OS’ response came, “The Business Strategy Consultation”:
It has been agreed with Ministers to focus the business around five key areas. These are:
1. Promote innovation for economic benefit and social engagement
2. Increase the use of Ordnance Survey data
3. Support the sharing of information across the whole of the public sector
4. Increase efficiency to develop a sustainable business for the future
5. Enhance value through the creation of an innovative trading entityThe overall aim of this new business strategy is to provide the best balance between making information more widely available and creating a sustainable future for Ordnance Survey and the wider market.
A sustainable future for the Ordnance Survey cannot be based around any licensing regime that acts as a lock-in to their customers. We currently have a situation where if you have used OS data, you cannot stop paying their license fees as your data, that you have created, has been partially derived from the OS base maps. I do not wish to enter any debate about funding models, the sustainability of a national mapping agency or any other side issue.
The practice of claiming copyright for derived data must end if any of the Cabinet Office’s or the Ordnance Survey’s new objectives are to be met.
OpenSpace – Not Open
So what exactly have the Ordnance Survey done? Aside from some clumsy youtube marketing of the consultation, so far the answer to the points above has been the launch of the OS Open Space API and the GeoVation events. OpenSpace is an online mapping platform, aimed at non-profit making organisations. The maps are perfectly good, its a nice technical achievement. GeoVation is an attempt by the OS to promote the use of geographical information (ie Ordnance Survey data) to those who might not already be using it. Fine.
The launch of these services are being sold as the answer to all of the OS’ problems, and yet we have heard no mention of derived data. Not one. However, there is a large section on derived data in the Terms and Conditions of the OpenSpace API, some of which I will publish here:
5.4 Derived Data
5.4.1 You may create Derived Data, and You may permit End User’s to create Derived Data, in connection with Your Web Application. In the event that You or any End User creates Derived Data, such Derived Data shall be owned by Us, save that if any Derived Data is created which is a severable improvement (as defined by Commission Regulation (EC) No 772/2004, known as the Technology Transfer Block Exemption) of the Ordnance Survey Data then such Derived Data shall be owned by the person or entity creating the same.
So much for being open, any data created using the OpenSpace API is claimed under OS copyright as derived data. I would like to show an example of why I cannot use OpenSpace. Earlier this year I put together a mapping application for FutureSonic09 the arts, music and environmental festival in Manchester. It was a fun, participative experiment to crowdsource data from the public to try and measure the urban heat island effect of Manchester, called Climate Bubbles. People go out, blow some bubbles and chase them and show us on the map how far they went and in what direction:
Even with a simple application like this, created for the Met Office and Lancaster University, I cannot use the OpenSpace API. If I were to use OpenSpace, then Ordnance Survey claims derived data copyright over whatever data the public contributes. Now I cannot share this data, or use this data myself if I or the third party are not paying Ordnance Survey license fees. So much for the goals of “promoting innovation for economic benefit and social engagement” or “supporting the sharing of information across the whole of the public sector”.
GeoVation – Open Wash
So what is GeoVation?
“Through GeoVation, Ordnance Survey® will offer for the first time public access to its digital mapping products for people developing new ideas.”
Lets go back to a lecture that Tim Berners Lee, the government’s newly crowned open data Czar, gave in 2006 where he made the case for access to raw OS data:
“There’s a moral argument that says, for a well-run country, we should know where we are, where things are, and that data should be available…I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data”
Tim Berners Lee said that in 2006. It is now 2009 and we finally have some kind of programme where the OS seems to be offering some kind of access to the data. However, so far this is a whole lot of wash. By that I mean the sort of “green wash” we see with various large energy companies claiming to be green. This is “open wash”, the Ordnance Survey is offering a little bit of access to the data, yet absolutely no freedom to use it.
OpenSpace and GeoVation are both exercises in showing that the Ordnance Survey can be relevant in a world where data and information are shared and free flowing. This is simply not the case while the OS claims copyright over derived data. I will repeat myself:
The practice of claiming copyright for derived data must end if any of the Cabinet Office’s or the Ordnance Survey’s new objectives are to be met.
See our new open data champion, Tim Berners Lee, talk about the possibilities in a world where data is open, shared and free flowing:
