Now you know I agree with your sentiment.. some way we need to be able to fund the very expensive collection of the data that produces Mastermap and at the same time allow for its non-commerical use. You know the saying about oil tankers steering….

ed

I agreed completely with Allan’s analysis about usual suspects being very unlikely see powerful new uses of your lovely data. I’m afraid I’m not surprised that you’re not finding anyone willing to hack with the tiny bits of sample data given away for free.

Remember, when someone does go to the effort of doing innovative stuff for free they have to be motivated, and the most powerful motivation is the thought that loads of people might use your widget. If you hack sample Mastermap data, the most encouraging thought you might have is that one of the companies which can afford the 20 squillion pounds per square inch licencing cost might rip off your idea.

Also, don’t forget the idea of limited use free licencing. At mySociety we’ve already built a pair of web services using OS and non-OS geodata which work fine. The non-OS one, Gaze, is free and already being used (it contains global placenames, disambiguation of placenames and population density info). We’d love to open the OS one on limited licenses – ‘get data about anywhere in the UK, but only a max of 500 queries a day’, that sort of thing.

Oh yes, we’d also be happy to build you a mastermap web service, if you could see to getting the data into our hands )

best,

Tom

Some positive things that should be noted. And encouraged.

Ed Parsons is interested in seeing innovative uses of Mastermap and is prepared to be open minded about the results
Kevin Flanders ponders the meaning of Open in an article at Directions an…

I think there is some validity in what you say.. most users of Mastermap are traditional users of digital mapping not geographic information. There is no way the OS could make a whole dataset like Mastermap free but I would be interested to see what the geohacker community could do with sample data, as you say this is where the innovation is happening.

ed

In other words, if you sell your data to “map” people, you’ll get “maps”. If only “map” people can afford your data, then you’ve locked yourself into a usage pattern that will only change slowly. If you want innovation, maybe you need to be innovative first, and a freely available data set would be pretty innovative for OS!