Rialtas.net - Government 2.0

From the Register:

Top boffins have given economic backing to a campaign to relax access restrictions on government-collected databases, such as the Ordnance Survey’s unrivalled stash of UK mapping information.

The Department for Business, Employment and Regulatory Reform (BERR, formerly DTI) released the analysis, commissioned from a team at the University of Cambridge, last week. It refutes the oft-cited government line that allowing free access and reuse of national data assets would harm the economy.

The Free Our Data campaign has been arguing against that line for two years, and now has the sums to back up its smack talk.

In fact, 147 pages of number-crunching led to the conclusion that opening up the data vaults at the Met Office, Land Registry and a host of other agencies could benefit the economy to the tune of net £164m. The vast majority of that sum would come from the Ordnance Survey, however.Subject to a policy review, charges for accessing and reusing reams of data should therefore be dropped, they argue.

It would mean developers could freely access mapping data to create their own location-dependent apps, rather than be reliant on Google Maps, for example.

The Report ‘Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds’ is available online.

It’s the same situation in Ireland with the OSI ‘owning’ all of the governments mapping data and licensing it at substantial cost to other government agencies and to private industries.

One can only imagine the amount of innovation that would be unleashed were this data to be made available free of cost to businesses and entrepreneurs.

Another immediately obvious benefit would be public safety.

In Ireland all Counties have a ‘Major Emergency Plan’ in place (The Plan provides for a co-ordinated response to major emergencies arising, for example, from a major road, train, air or river accident; a serious fire; violent storms; flooding or a dangerous incident) , and for all counties GIS assets and mapping data are an essential element of this plan.

In an emergency the emergency personnel may need relevant map data which also displays things like the location of gas pipes , power cables, water hydrants etc. In addition to basic maps of the area.

At the moment it is not clear if a major emergency occurred on a border between two counties, how this would be handled, as each counties mapping assets (licensed from the OSI) literally stops at the county boundary.

This could give rise to a situation where emergency workers have only half a map or two half maps of the emergency area. There is also the possibility that the two adjacent county councils have different (and incompatible) mapping systems, so there may not even be the possibility of easily creating a compound map.

Were OSI mapping assets readily and cheaply available however, each county could also store relevant mapping of adjacent counties, ensuring that in an emergency mapping resources would be readily available.

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