[geo-discuss] rejectinspire.org

[Jo Walsh]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 04:33:12PM +0100, Benjamin Henrion wrote:
> Garand <Michel.Garand at frankfurt-oder.de> [060214]:
> > what is the alternative to inspire? to change it or do without it or
> 
> First, get rid of Inspire in its actual form. It is nearly impossible to
> change it, since no amendments are possible in second reading, only
> amendments voted by EP in first reading can be put forward. I need to
> have a look at the amendments of 1st reading, but I did not see anything
> about "Public Domain" or other copyleft licencing.

On the one hand a lot of good thinking by good people has gone into
the construction of INSPIRE and its surrounding efforts and projects
over a period of 10 years, if one includes the GI2000 effort that fell
off the map when the entire European Commission had to resign for
corruption reasons back in 1999. 

But as the draft has gone through the co-decision process each round
has added more emphasis on the preservation of "intellectual property"
rights and the different ways in which mapping agencies can charge the
public, and other government departments, for public geodata.
http://publicgeodata.org/index.cgi/InspireTimeline is an attempt to
illustrate some of the passage of this.
http://space.frot.org/docs/inspire_directive.html is what i thought
was most wrong with the draft before the 1st reading. There is a
mythical original draft of INSPIRE somewhere that is unpublished.

http://cemml.carleton.ca:8080/OGUG/pgl , which Daniel Faivre posted
recently, looks like a good candidate reference for an open geodata
license. To have a de facto standard license for open and public
geodata, even just as a place to focus discussion, would save a lot of
conversational energy from being used up. The openstreetmap.org list
is going through another heavy round of licensing discussion / rights
to reuse / rights of contributors conversation right now, see e.g. Tom
Carden's recent post there: 
http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2006-February/002432.html

http://okfn.org/geo/manifesto.php was trying to emphasise how pleasant
it would be if there were one compatible license both for open and
free mapping projects to use, that was also suitable for open
licensing at least part of the datasets that the NMAs collect.

http://publicgeodata.org/index.cgi/AlternativeModels is a sketch, so
far. My sense is that it is technologically possible to collect more and
better data locally for less cost; that data syndication and sharing
services are built into this next generation of geospatial software,
so that a lot of the INSPIRE impact will be erecting artificial walls
and expensive charging mechanisms around Web Map Service, Web Feature
Service interfaces that are available in their information management
systems by default. OpenStreetmap has a home-grown RESTful interface 
for adding and editing map information via the web, while keepign a
transaction history of changes which can be rolled back in branches;
WFS-Transactional provides a baseline for this kind of service as an
GIS industry open standard. 

The national mapping agency tends towards becoming a broker; they are
aggregating and re-publishing data, and may have a role in assessing
its integrity; but there is no need for vast outsourcing operations of
data gardening, nor a field outfit of GPS equipped ground truthers.
There won't be all that much activity that incur cost. So there won't
need to be much emphasis on recovering costs; geographic information
is collected as a byproduct of other activities of space maintenance
and governance; open standards and open protocols implemented in both
free and proprietary software for managing that information, are
designed to make data exchange seamless.

One 'compromise' type thought that has been had is that NMAs could offer
a data set that is generalised, to say 5 or 10m accuracy, it would
still be good enough and useful enough for the majority of research,
analysis, prototype projects for which free public geodata is so badly
needed in Europe right now. GALILEO is a good model to look at - it
guarantees a freely available public signal - a recognition that if
people had to pay for it, but could get GPS for free, no-one would use
GALILEO and it would suppress the rate of take-up and the different
kinds of social infrastructure (particularly in transport systems)
which they are hoping the new system will facilitate a boom in the
building of. GALILEO will still have an ultra-high-accuracy signal for
critical applications which can be paid for. But GALILEO really looks
more like a cost-writeoff, there is a recognition there that a spatial
information generating infrastructure will pay for itself, in terms of
savings in transport costs, efficiency in engineering logistics, 
saving on future wear and tear on polluted environments. It can
definitely be argued that having a working, equitable version of
something like INSPIRE could be crucial in terms of how much of what
is built with GALILEO can be created in Europe and create value there.


jo