I could be snarky and say better late than never, however the guidelines and new licenses today published by Ordnance Survey are a really positive step forward.
As requested by many, myself included, the OS in their documents have tried to explain with examples what is now possible to create and then distribute in terms of new geospatial data.
This should solve the problem for many potential users of Google Maps, for example, who have been frightened off from using this great free resource by previously aggressive if unclear guidelines.
Some key aspects..
- As expected there are no restrictions on deriving or displaying data based on OS Opendata datasets.
- Data collected by independent means (GPS, field survey) and then verified in relation to OS data is free of OS restrictions
- The real innovation “Free to use” terms, means that organisations licensing data for business use, are able to infer the position or create new data without restrictions as long as the new data is not a direct copy of an existing feature in the OS product.
These aspects of the new license/guidelines are illustrated with some rather cheesy but useful case studies.
There are however some more grey areas, which may still cause concern to some, around addressing (oh no !! the humanity) the creation of address centroids is seen as copying features!
I wonder a what level of abstraction this no longer the case, is a point representing a street range ok ? A neighbourhood ?
I fundamentally disagree with the example that a school catchment area is OS derived data, what intellectual effort has the OS contributed to it’s creation ?
Still overall this is a massive step forward and the OS should be congratulated on it’s effort in communicating their position clearly.
This is clearly one of the biggest news stories of the last few months for the UK, I can’t help but wonder while the announcements were not made in the public forum of the AGI conference.. Maybe this is the Macworld moment for Ordnance Survey ?
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)