I went along yesterday to the Open Knowledge Forum meeting on Open Geodata in London. Overall I was very impressed by the debate, apart from a couple of exceptions we seem to be moving the arguement away from the simple “free data good, charging for data bad” mantra – in particular Roger Longhorns’ presentation was a well balanced review of the availability of geodata around the word and the various models used to fund it. Hopefully this along with the other presentations will be posted on the web in due course.
The process of community-based efforts to capture copyright free geodata is slowly beginning, it will be an uphill struggle as the capture and maintenance of Geodata is expensive, but then again so is the development of Operating Systems.
No I don’t see a Linux like Mastermap appearing anytime soon, but a national street map could be possible within a couple of years.
Written and submitted from the BMI lounge at Dublin Airport, using a free 802.11 network.