Category: opensource

Andrew summarises  with clarity the current state of licensing for “open” geodata on his blog. This is going to be an emerging theme over the next year as more data becomes available and there is greater awareness of the immature state of data licensing compared to software licensing.

When I touched upon the subject over the summer is was within the context of DRM a scary umbrella term that has too much baggage, but one which at least in an abstract sense describes the problem.

I have no doubt that the open geodata community will go through the difficult and potentially painful process the software industry experienced to reach the current broad range of potential licenses. This is a necessary step for as Andrew points out for many potential data publishers there is no standard license that is close enough to matching their needs.

As this process takes place a good resource is Kevin Promfret’s excellent blog on spatial law who is tracking licensing developments.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

As the Guardian Technology blog notes the UK government is once again trying to push Government Departments into looking at Open Source software solutions at least as an alternative to the proprietary software we all know and love.

This is not the big stick approach which has been used in some other countries, here the policy is from a procurement perspective to just make sure open source solutions are see viewed on an equal footing, taking into account the total cost of ownership of new systems recognising the many years of support and maintenance that will follow the initial purchase.

This I hope will not just be seen as the simplistic religious debate between Windows v Linux, Microsoft Office v Open Office, or MySQL v Oracle, because actually it is not in terms of packaged software where the real benefits can be found.

The real big costs in Government IT projects go into the bespoke software development customising or building additional functionality around off the shelf software like Oracle or SAP, or from the GI perspective ArcGIS.

This is where this is massive potential, for much of the code developed solves very similar problems for different departments and agencies across government. As things currently  stand none of this code is reused and each department pays for similar code to be developed for them, often I’m afraid to say by the same vendors.

So for example in the GI world, the data management systems developed to build and maintain the maps for Ordnance Survey is not so different from that needed by the UK Hydrographic Survey, or at a larger scale the tools used by the Land Registry to maintain your title deed plans are not so different to what is needed  to build and maintain OS Mastermap.

If the code developed to meet these needs was made open source, the initial code base could be used and maintained by all government agencies each benefiting from potential improvements developed by the others, and the tax payer never have to fund more reinvention.

There is once small hitch with this, companies like Google are very open about their use and support of open source software tools, which form the backbone of their back office systems, and which can be maintained and extended internally by skilled engineers.

Over the last 10 years most of the IT expertise has left government departments, meaning that very few actual software engineers or developers are left within government.. They have all been outsourced. This means that the potential benefit is reduced internal maintenance of code and its development cannot occur within house, another reason perhaps government should think about re-skilling in IT ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

This week the innovative guys as Nestroia have launched an experimental version of their great real estate aggregation site using OpenStreetMap mapping as an alternative to the usual Google Map Tiles. This is great vote of confidence for OpenstreetMap, but it also highlights some of the problems creating geodata from the cloud.

Where OSM data is comprehenive the map tiles are often more detailed than those Google supply which are based on commerical available datasets. For example this section of tiles covering my childhood neighbourhood in London is truely beatiful, in many ways a better map than the commerical websites.

However the problem is that the coverage for OSM data is not yet complete, and where there is incomplete coverage, for this type of application, its use is a problem. Look at these examples from Wokingham, West of London and part of the UK’s silicon valley.

The Google maps tiles using Tele Atlas data are pretty much complete..

However the OSM version has a lot of missing detail..

Mapping data really does need to offer complete coverage for it to be really useful, some may remember in the UK in the early days of mobile phones there was an alterative system based on local hotspots called Rabbit. This failed becasue you had to be within 100m or so of a hot spot, unlike the wider coverage of the early analogue mobile systems.

Mapping data needs to be as comprehensive, with no coverage gaps, what is great about Nestoria’s early exposure of the data in a real application is to highlight where more volunteer work needs to be done to complete the work.. If this is achieved by the OSM community, the critic’s of open source geodata will be silenced.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.