Data Policy – Page 20 – edparsons.com

This week the guardian “free our data” campaign recaps on a years activities and what progress has been made, not a great deal I’m afraid, awareness may have been increased, but this is still not an issue on the political radar screen because as Charles and Michael point out, there really is nobody in government with the remit for information.

This week a comment I made at the Open Knowledge conference last weekend is used, I think, to support the campaigns aims, maybe it can be used in that way, but my intention in bringing up the “Lockerbie question” was to point out the dangers of under-funding national mapping.

The “next Lockerbie” – a disaster such as a plane crash in a remote area – could bring problems for emergency services. Last year the government ended its “National Interest Mapping Service Agreement”, which funded the mapping by Ordnance Survey of remote areas that a private organisation might not bother with. As recently as 2004-05, Nimsa made up 11% of the Ordnance Survey’s turnover. The effect, says Ed Parsons, until December chief technology officer of OS, is that changes in remote areas of Scotland may go unmapped for years – “which is fine, until the next Lockerbie happens”. OS says it will continue a “mapping for emergencies” helpline service.

I would argue that the demise of NIMSA points out the major weakness in the argument for direct taxpayer funding of national mapping activities, in the one area of the work carried out by the OS which was directly funded by government, that funding was cut when the money got tight, and these activities were sacrificed to allow DCLG to continue to fund tasks it deemed more important.

The only organisations which actually value information are those who use it, and it therefore is logical that they should pay for it.

However, although I firmly believe the current funding model for the OS is the correct one, I am not going to argue that as currently defined the licensing framework around the crown copyright data the OS manages is fit for purpose.

There needs to be a fundamentally new approach to licensing OS data which allows greater access to information, and yes for some types of data and for some types of user this would be without cost to the end user. This could be achieved with minimal impact on the financial performance of OS but could inject a major boost to the UK GI industry.

Written and submitted from the BA lounge, Schipol, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.

The Free Our Data campaign this week asks “Will the government try to privatise the UK Hydrographic Office?” – Such a development I believe has been on the cards for some time and is a result to some extent of the continuing lack of focus or understanding of information as an asset.

You get the impression that the management of information is seen by government purely as a cost to endure rather than the potential benefit it would be, if government information was better managed and shared across .gov.uk.

In saying that, UKHO is actually more an aggregator of information rather than a producer, its value as an organisation comes from the systems and processes to carry out the complex task of rapidly bringing together global datasets produced by 100’s of other marine data collectors – quite a specialised field.

If this niche is seen as valuable enough to consider privatisation, then how much more interest can the treasury have in the other agencies which create information and therefore sit on more valuable assets ?

Written and submitted from the Apple Store, London, using its free 802.11 network.