Richard posts an interesting set of thoughts on geodata licensing, specifically CC-SA which is what openstreetmap uses. Recent threads on the OSM mailing list mirror some of the age-old BSD vs. GPL debates and unsurprisingly fail to reach a consensus. I’m hoping that debate before or during the workshop will settle down to something we can work with.
Category Archives: Geodata
Free Our Data
Ed notes (and dislikes) this piece in the Guardian about how taxpayer funded map data should be Free. The article isn’t limited to geodata and fails to mention openstreetmap like previous articles so perhaps it has an industry source. They make good work of the juicy target – the OS – and mention the Peter Weiss article.
More interestingly they bring up other examples like the Hydrographic Office’s somewhat mad scheme of copyrighting tide tables.
gazeteer
Mikel notes that geonames.org have combined a bunch of free data to make an aggregated geocoder for cities and postcodes. I’m not confident their UK postcode data is free, but it’s a fantastic idea and one worth charging for.
