We CAN get there from here

On Wednesday, as part of the Autumn Budget, the Chancellor announced that the government will be creating a Geospatial Commission “to establish how to open up freely the OS MasterMap data to UK-based small businesses”. It will be supported by new funding of £80 million over two years. The Commission will be looking at a range of things including:

• improving the access to, links between, and quality of their data
• looking at making more geospatial data available for free and without restriction
• setting regulation and policy in relation to geospatial data created by the public sector
• holding individual bodies to account for delivery against the geospatial strategy
• providing strategic oversight and direction across Whitehall and public bodies who operate in this area

That’s a big pot of money to get something done and a remit that ticks all of the right boxes. As the ODI blog post notes, it creates “the opportunity for national mapping agencies to adapt to a future where they become stewards for national mapping data infrastructure, making sure that data is available to meet the needs of everyone in the country”.

So, I’m really surprised that the many of the reactions from the open data community have been fairly negative. I understand the concerns that the end result might not be a completely open Mastermap. There are many, many ways in which this could end up with little or no change to the status quo. That’s certainly true if we ignore the opportunity to embed some change.

From my perspective, this is the biggest step towards a more open future for UK geospatial data since the first OS Open Data release in 2010. (I remember excitedly hitting the publish button to make their first Linked Data release publicly accessible)

Anyone who has been involved with open data in the UK will have encountered the Ordnance Survey licensing issues that are massively inhibiting both the release and use of open data in the UK. It’s a frustration of mine that these issues aren’t manifest in the various open data indexes.

In my opinion, anything that moves us forward from the current licensing position is to be welcomed. Yes, we all want a completely open MasterMap. That’s our shared goal. But how do we get there?

We’ve just seen the government task and resource itself to do something that can help us achieve that goal. It’s taken concerted effort by a number of people to get to this point. We should be focusing on what we all can do, right now, to help this process stay on track. Dismissing it as an already failed attempt isn’t helpful.

I think there’s a great deal that the community could do to engage with and support this process.

Here’s a few ideas of things of ways that we could inject some useful thinking into the process:

• Can we pull together examples of where existing licensing restrictions are causing friction for UK businesses? Those of who us have been involved with open data have internalised many of these issues already, but we need to make sure they’re clearly understood by a wider audience
• Can we do the same for local government data and services? There are loads of these too. Particularly compelling examples will be those that highlight where more open licensing can help improve local service delivery
• Where could greater clarity around existing licensing arrangements help UK businesses, public sector and civil society organisations achieve greater impact? It often seems like some projects and local areas are able to achieve releases where others can’t.
• Even if all of MasterMap were open tomorrow, it might still be difficult to access. No-one likes the current shopping cart model for accessing OS open data. What services would we expect from the OS and others that would make this data useful? I suspect this would go beyond “let me download some shapefiles”. We built some of these ideas into the OS Linked Data site. It still baffles me that you can’t find much OS data on the OS website.
• If all of MasterMap isn’t made open, then which elements of it would unlock the most value? Are there specific layers or data types that could reduce friction in important application areas?
• Similarly, how could the existing OS open data be improved to make it more useful? Hint: currently all of the data is generalised and doesn’t have any stable identifiers at all.
• What could the OS and others do to support the rest of us in annotating and improving their data assets? The OS switched off its TOID lookup service because no-one was using it. It wasn’t very good. So what would we expect that type of identifier service to do?
• If there is more openly licensed data available, then how could it be usefully added to OpenStreetMap and used by the ecosystem of open geospatial tools that it is supporting?
• We all want access to MasterMap because its a rich resource. What are the options available to ensure that the Ordnance Survey stays resourced to a level where we can retain it as a national asset? Are there reasonable compromises to be made between opening all the data and them offering some commercial services around it?
• …etc, etc, etc.

Personally, I’m choosing to be optimistic. Let’s get to work to create the result we want to see.