[Openstreetmap] Please Help Petition for Public Access to Geodata in Europe

[Jo Walsh]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 11:12:53AM +0100, Preben Mikael Bohn wrote:
> Could ypu please explain _exactly_ where in the actual proposal - located
> at http://inspire.jrc.it/proposal/EN.pdf - you find arguments for the
> above mentioned sentence: "entrench a policy of charging European citizens
> to access public information they've already paid to collect"?

If you look at http://publicgeodata.org/InspireTimeline you can see how the wording
of the Directive has changed since this original draft, as it has gone
through the co-decision process between the Commission and the Council.

The version you looked at is the original proposal, the 26-7-2004 one.
The "experience has shown us that making minimal services available to
the public free of charge" passage in the preamble is gone now. 
http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/05/st10/st10553.en05.pdf is
the version i am looking at on which the Council's commentary mentioning
rights is based: http://register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/05/st12/st12064-re02ad01.en05.pdf

Most telling is the list of different data services in what is Article
18 in the early draft you posted, and Article 11 in the draft that
went through the first reading, discussing access data in different ways: 
a) discovery services, b) view services, c) download services, d)
transformation services e) services allowing spatial data services to
be invoked. [...whatever the latter actually do. they sound super meta]

The INSPIRE draft (the one you looked at) used to say: 

 [[ Member States shall ensure that the services referred 
   to in Article 18(1)(a) and (b) are available to the public free of charge. ]]

The INSPIRE draft that is starting on second reading now, says in same place:

 [[ 1. Member States shall ensure that:
       the services referred to in Article 11(1)(a) are available to
 the public free of charge;
       the services referred to in Article 11(1)(b) are, as a rule,
 available to the public free of charge. However, in cases where charges and/or 
 licences are an essential precondition to maintain the spatial data sets and services or
 to fulfil requirements of already existing international spatial data infrastructure in a
 sustainable way, Member States may apply charges and/or licences either to the
 person providing the service to the public, or, where the service provider chooses,
 to the public itself. ]]

INSPIRE used to, as you point out, guarantee free discovery and
*viewing* of spatial data sets - not much use to data providers when it means
having to invest in a web mapping infrastructure rather than an FTP
site; not much use to use, when to build routing applications, we need 
vector data in machine-readable form, and GML and other spatial XML
documents need to be downloaded in order to be viewed.

The new wording now suggests that what some people call
"cost-recovery", and what i would rather call "charging the public",
is an *essential precondition* to some kinds of data distribution and
collection. This is a blanket get-out clause in the interests of the
people we know at state-run or until recently state-run data collecting 
agencies who are being squeezed into a commercial licensing policy over 
public geodata, thus squeezing value out of all the local government,
small business and research activities that depend on that data.
http://okfn.org/geo/pdf/Ordnance_Survey_Says_Dont_Mess_Up_Our_Maps.pdf

This isn't what the drafters wanted; it's not what Europe needs.
 
It's a shame that the information on the inspire.jrc.it site itself is
so out of date and no longer tells European citizens accurate facts
about how the description of their world is being brokered around them.

I want http://publicgeodata.org to be more of a collaborative
research resource, tho trying to balance two different languages against
one another - on the one hand something that will engage and convince
technical professionals - on the other something that will convince
citizens in general that this is a much deeper issue than its niche
technical presentation as a directive might suggest - that's hard. :/ 
http://publicgeodata.org/ActOnInspire is more my home node for research.

> "(16) Experience in the Member States has shown that it is important, for
> the successful implementation of an infrastructure for spatial
> information, that a minimum number of services be made available to the
> public free of charge. Member States should therefore make available, as a
> minimum and free of charge, the services for discovering and viewing
> spatial data sets."

This statement just disappeared from what is going into second reading now. 


-jo