[Publicwhip-playing] Re: [geo-discuss] Re: [Openstreetmap] Coders needed for similar project & UK FOI act request update.

Sat Nov 12 19:46:53 UTC 2005

Jo Walsh wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 12:35:18PM +0000, Roger Longhorn wrote:
> 
>>James is quite correct. FoI is about access, NOT exploitation. Copyright 
>>is copyright, regardless of how you gain access to the material. In 
>>countries like the USA where much (not all) federal data and information 
>>is automatically, legally put into the public domain (a legal dimension 
>>of data, nothing to do with whether or not it is made publicly 
>>available)
> 
> 
> oh, burst my literalistic bubble, the lot of you. But i have some
> questions about both copyright and redistribution. 
> 
> BoundaryLine is one case, clearly identified as a product and under
> copyright. If Clive's FoI request for the data works for him, and then
> i make an identical request and am given *access* to the data... then
> i build a web service, which allows a query to make use of that data
> set without actually revealing the contents of the data set. Say,
> "from a lat/long pair, which ward boundary am i within", with a
> throttle to prevent people easily brute-forcing the shapes out.

some of the boundary line data is available as part of the 2001 census

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/op12.asp

What you actually get is vector data on "Output Areas" - but my
understanding is that these can be aggregated to ward boundaries etc.

It's still under coypright but is available at no cost

-- 

Sean