Does Government GIS Data Belong to the People?
cadalyst.com
cadalyst.com
Just to play devil's advocate, if the county builds a stadium for the local high school team, are citizen's entitled to free admission?
If they build a performing arts center, are citizens entitled to use it for free?
Every dollar in use fees for physical locations goes to defray the cost of the construction, use, and maintenance, lowering the actual taxpayer burden.
Cost of distribution for public information -- which will be collected regardless of use by anyone other than the government -- is de minimis. It is literally so low that it would cost the government more to do the accounting that could be reasonably charged for the act of distribution. What is unsupportable is not simply putting the data online.
The government serves the people, it is to act in their interest. It is unquestionably not in the people's interest to have this data charged for.
The marginal cost to produce data (or software) is almost nil -- hence the price should go to nil as well. THe only reason for a society to force the cost to be non-zero via licensing is to incentivize the creation of the data, but the government is going to do that anyway, since they need the data to function.
(The marginal cost thing is why we need copyright and patents -- we need to impose non-market controls, because otherwise price and profit go to nothing and there is no incentive to create things which have marginal costs of nothing like sheet music and new molecular compounds. Yes, there is some irony whenever a capitalist argues for intellectual property -- save my market by non-market rules!)
Also, data is non rivalrous, unlike a stadium. Basically an unlimited number of people can access it.
OTOH, charging something might put the onus of paying for the collection a bit closer to the users, if that group of users is small and well-defined. It wouldn't be fair for them to reap large benefits at the expense of everyone else.
That said, though, if the users are a large and not well-defined group, opening up the data is probably more beneficial.
That doesn't completely address the county doing collection that benefits everyone by providing information to a small group of people, but I think it supports the notion that any prices should be set to mitigate the sharing costs, not the collection costs (because the county should be organizing data collection around beneficial activities, not around creating salable data sets).
Nonsense, GIS data typically found in municipal datasets requires going out to field and physically locating items such as underground utilities and stream edges, as well as, verifying data pulled from other sources.
The cost of reproducing that data is low, but then again, the cost of unlocking a stadium is equally low...roughly equivalent to the cost of quality assurance measures one might take before distributing a copy of municipal GIS data, or the cost of maintaining adequate bandwidth to distribute data sets the size of a county GIS database containing 6" resolution aerial photography.
And nobody just "unlocks a stadium".
Keep in mind that GIS data is constantly revised as ownership of parcels changes, infrastructure is added or improved, properties are rezoned or receive variances, or when the aerial photography base layer gets updated.
Much of that data is legally binding (e.g. zoning districts) or critical to protect the public (e.g. fire hydrant locations) or important for environmental planning (e.g. wetland locations). Municipal GIS data isn't just some mailing list mined from magazine descriptions.
Obviously you are missing the point, going to the stadium is the result of something being on show there, the "content". Therefore, it would not be free. What should be free (excluding maintenance costs which would need to be payed) is the usage of the stadium and actually it most likely is.
I know that in the UK I think there is a data liberation act or something similar, where you can request for data to be made available in public which was payed for with tax money. I think, however, that you shouldn't even need to ask.
If they don't want to publish the data, then don't pay for it with tax money...
You are cherry picking.
Access typically is restricted during non-performance times when marginal costs approach zero, e.g. one cannot walk around the track after work or have a Saturday morning Frisbee toss on the field because the gates are locked.
There is no moral justification for the government's charging more than the cost of duplication (which itself should only ever have to be paid once).
A good comparison example is the UK's Ordnance Survey, who now release all high-level data for free (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-openda...) however the detailed data is only free to government institutions and their contractors. Private users of the detailed information pay alot of money for it (generally for site-location plans toward planning applications), which I assume is generally used for updating the database.
This all works quite well generally, though arguments could be made from either side as to more or less information being publicly available.
The key really is - if we want more government information to be free, we have to fund it more...
So it is possible to consider the OS as more of a publicly-operated for-profit company than as a public-service.
If governments limit themselves to doing things that can be sold on the open market then there would be no need for a government. Instead they should be catering to the market failures like generating mapping data that can then be used by government and business alike at marginal cost i.e. free.
More important to me than free OS data would be if the UK govt could create a GIS database of land ownership. This is where they lag behind the USA and Australia to my mind...
In New Zealand, the Geospatial Office estimated that the government could expect to see financial returns of $NZ 100 - 500 million from reducing barriers to GIS data access[1], and in 2010 the New Zealand government issues directives encouraging data to "standardise the licensing of government copyright works for re-use using Creative Commons New Zealand law licences"[2]. Mid last year Land Information New Zealand released the "LINZ Data Service" (http://data.linz.govt.nz) to make it incredibly easy to get hold of national GIS datasets.
Similarly, the Australian Government disbanded the Commonwealth Copyright Administration, and "agencies are now required to release copyright public sector information under Creative Commons BY-licences or other open content licences, wherever possible."[3] Throughout Europe we're seeing the same trend.
It's a sign of how far things have come - and how far some have to go when you hear things like:
> The County's logic was that GIS includes software and data (citing ESRI's definition of GIS as "a collection of software and data")
It is shocking that this would be used as a defence - not so much because of the clear and obvious (to technical literate people) difference between a data format and the software you might or might not use to manipulate it - and nevermind the plethora of FOSS GIS tools that are available - but that the County believes it's in the best interests of their constituents.
1. http://www.linz.govt.nz/sites/default/files/docs/geospatial-...
2. http://ict.govt.nz/guidance-and-resources/information-and-da...
3. http://www.ag.gov.au/Copyright/CommonwealthCopyrightAdminist...
That argument didn't go over well with the courts.
Peter Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress International
Veeck put the Standard Building Code as adopted by several local jurisdictions online.
SBCCI sued because the model code was protected by copyright.
http://www.pddoc.com/copyright/Veek_vs_Southern_Bldg_Code.ht...
http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/99/99-40632.cv2.wpd...
"A geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data."
Open Source: Quantum GIS http://www.qgis.org/ and GRASS http://www.osgeo.org/grass are good places to start.