I stumbled onto your blog and found it interesting for the forward thinking for a “public sector guy” and hope that you dont feel offended by that.
Now, even though the “Oil Tanker” is capable of shipping the oil to the far away lands. But, still it is shipping oil unknown of the real understanding of what is it carrying as it does not understand the type of fuel that a consumer needs to fill in his car.
This is synomomynous of the old world style of marketing out of the bag. “I have this all, tell me when to stop”

The newer philosophy of customer centricity may be a guide for the next generation of “Oil Business”.
Probably, it would mean building a business partner network, with consumer as a part of the network, you can build solutions that it actually needs. And by consumer I mean the corporates who can exploit this data better.
This may inturn warrant looking for data from ground from scratch.

Yes we will in due course do both WMS and WFS, in fact we already use WMS for most of our internal systems.

Don’t know how we would license this – what do you think ?

Yes OK this maybe not very 2.0 for much of the industry, but for the OS a move in this direction I would argue would be significant.

Tom, I’m waiting for your call.. lets see what we can do.

If we’re going to be able to ‘try OS data for free’, what kind of license terms are likely to be attached to the data coming out of any OS web services?

To be honest, none of this sounds very “2.0″ to me. Googlezon et al have been offering web service based, free for re-use access to their data for years. “2.0 Culture” descriptions tend to include an “architecture of participation”; providing means for ‘users’ to become ‘producers’, to correct information and contribute their own – the OpenStreetmap model, where geospatial data becomes a kind of collective work. When the OS starts to take this idea seriously, perhaps I’ll believe it’s reached the 21st century

Tom deserves a better response than you’re offering: how can his cohorts at MySociety come up with a good proposal for use of OS data, unless they can find out what’s in it?

ed

Ed said “Make us a proposal for what you want to do with it” and laughed it off.

However, having more data than you strictly need is precisely how you find new uses, and how you explore all this non-obvious metadata you’ve been so carefully adding. As you say yourself “Let users discover the value in OS data by actually deploying it, and if the value is there, they will pay for it later.”

Unfortunately for the culture of change at the OS, it is the most expensive data that is the hardest to percieve value in without playing with it – what sort of intruiging stuff lies in all those vector layers and toids?

This will no doubt provoke lots of discussion amongst the ‘traditional’
GI and GIS users; specifically in the public sector. If it doesn’t then it’s time to pack up and go home…

It’s nothing if not controversial – good post Ed.