[Openstreetmap] open geodata access and OS GB

[Jo Walsh]

hello roger, list,

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 07:32:01PM +0100, Roger Longhorn wrote:
> From the point of view of many of the EuroGeographic mapping agency 
> members, OS is doing superb work and some of the most advanced in Europe - 
> totally digital database, no more paper maps needed, new products can be 
> fully object-oriented digital database - which is maintained using Open 
> Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant metadata (GML ver 2.0 as of now), 
> 
> technology. But from the point of view of NMAs that are struggling to catch 
> up to OS but are hampered by serious funding restrictions from their own 

What use the technocratic imperative though, if this beautiful data
is not being shared and re-used in as many interesting and beneficial
ways as possible? An expensive island, covering only a small amount of
the planet's surface, does not have that much value on a larger scale.

Open source products such as mapserver support the latest OGC
standards and provide in theory very adequate features to manipulate
and represent the OS mastermap data sets. There is an OpenSDI effort
by domain experts to develop a national spatial data infrastructure
class set of open source GIS tools.

Why doesn't the government support the development of open source GIS
projects and interfaces to them? rather than R'n'I mimicking academic
and artistic projects a year or two past date.

Perhaps it is possible there might be another commercial model, an NMA
salling its consultancy services over an open source data set, with a
certain amount of state-contracted work agreed as is at present undere
the NIMSA agreement. 


-jo