UK government considers open source Ordnance Survey data

shame they don't extend this to admiralty

The UKHO who publish admiralty charts have just massively increased the cost of using their data as they need to maximise revenue. Someone whould tell UK.gov to be a bit more consistent. BTW US Navy charts are free to download.

How unpredictable

Whitehall favours the option with the vaguest definition - quelle surprise.

As for the PAF - its not the public that would get the benefit from freeing the PAF but a bunch of web services trying to resell someone else's information and throwing patent and copyright suits around to protect "their" IP.

As a tax payer its my information and I vote to screw every last penny out of the vultures who want to access it.

They should open Hydrographic Office data too!

The government should enable the Hydrographic Office to release digital nautical charts and tide data for free too. Surely there's more justification to release this data for free - Maritime Safety.

There's something wrong when I can get free charts for the U.S. but not for blighty!

Pay for codes? Only in Britain.

Canada shows the way! < http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/help/usingfpc.jsf >

By code, by address. F R E E

Oh, we also have a very special one (remembering the format is Letter Number Letter Number Letter Number) H0H 0H0 - its address is the North Pole where a certain guy is very busy at this time of year. (Who aid civil servants don't have a sense of humour?)

A public sector success? Quick, let's cripple it!

Is this a subtle way of depriving Royal Mail of a revenue stream, so that the governement can later claim it's another public sector basket case that must be sold off?

While free access to postcode and ordinance survey data may seem like a good idea, can you imagine the (overseas) companies that currently pay for this information passing the savings back to the customer? In the meantime, the lost revenue and maintenance costs will have to come from somewhere, i.e. the UK tax payer.

there is another way

The problem is that hobbyists like myself want access to the PAF but can't get it because it's too expensive. How about a solution where the database is hosted with a robust API that allows for a certain number of uses free for the hobbyists but still charges for the companies that want to do high volume lookups.

Actually, it's OUR expensive dataset

because as you point out, we paid for it.

That this confuses you speaks volumes.

I agree ...

... with Stratman.

The data are provided by public purse and should be available to the public (OS and PAF).

Matters of national security or bits best kept schtum about are probably best kept schtum about so it is not really a free for all release but a managed release in which the "public" have about as much access as the organisation deemed to maintain the data.

I view holding out on info/data as something belonging to a long gone age of dinosaurs :-) especially when it depends upon the public purse.

And I do have to wonder about what is the notion of "public" enshrined in law (Worldwide, European, UK, England & Wales, Scotland).

A nonentity?

A peoples to be taxed, taxed, taxed and taxed again?

What/who, if any, has at least a democratic vision of public services and the "public"?

Go for it

2 million quid seems like a lot, but for an organisation the size of the the Post Office, it's a pretty insignificant sum. I think the point is that since they are making so *little* money off it, there would be more benefit to the country by making it freely available.

I'm very much looking forward to the OS data being made free.

Free data

There is so much that can be gained from providing free OS data. Currently, if you want to download maps for GPS devices, satnav, the mapping data comes from OS and that's why the maps are expensive.

Take a look at the map data for MemoryMap,the crazy thing is, if you were to download all the map data for the UK it will actually cost you more than if you bought every OS map in your local book/outdoor shop, which when you think about it is insane: as the paper versions of the maps must be produced from the digital data and so must cost more!

More applications at lower cost would be developed if the map data was free.

And why should a government department make a profit from the data? It's effectively a form of taxation. The primary customer of the OS is the military, the map data isn't produced for Joe Public, - ok, you could argue some of it is, but this stuff has to be produced for the military.

So selling it on to the public is a way to raise revenue for a department which we're already paying for out of general taxation.

It should be free.

Postcode data: For many years the Post Office have been using postcodes as the primary means to route mail to its destination, using hand writing/optical recognition. Many years ago they embarked on a long campaign to encourge us to use the post code, and if I recall correctly, look up the post code by asking someone in the post office.

Now, with the internet, looking up the post code should be an easy thing, but it's not. You have to jump through hoops and hurdles to get that information.

For F**cks sake Royal Mail, if you want us to use the Post Code because it saves you money, then at least make it easy for us to obtain that information! Don't be such a bunch of tossers and deliberately make it difficult for us. Either you want us to use the postcode or you don't.

I shouldn't have to enter a ton of personal information about myself just to obtain a post code, I don't want an account with you, I don't need to register, all I want is the f**ng postcode!,I shouldn't have to enter information which isn't needed for you to give me the post code, which who the hell knows what you do with said information, and do we trust your data protection policy - if we can friggin find it and be bothered to read it in the first place.

But RM, not exactly known for the their forward thinkingness, their intelligence are they?

Personally, with the way RM employees keep stealing packages sent to me and my neighbours, I'd love them to go out of business and replace them with better.

Experian QAS

I'm with the Anonymous Coward/Xmas/00:42, I bet Experian QAS and QuickAddress Pro cost the taxpayer more than 2M a year.

"and to support democratic accountability"

Excuse me, what? How will public access to map data support democratic accountability... in fact, what does that phrase even mean?

A strange old thing?

In the UK it, on the face of it, seems a rather strange old way of doing things.

For example, were you or I to do something that needed to be copyright protected we could do it and we would be the copyright owners.

For those of you involved in, say, software development if you get the application published in the US it can probably attract copyright (I am not to sure about the UK though).

And for people that do stuff that is copyright protected under in employment under terms of employment then that will be copyright protectable by the employer.

But in the UK should public funds be used to do something then it is Crown Copyright protected or so it seems.

Now to me that seems a wee bit daft. Crown Copyright based on public funds seems to be a theft of sorts. Were the Crown to pay for something out of it's own funds (that is non public sourced/taxed income) then it seems reasonable for it to be Crown Copyright..

Perhaps there should be a new category of UK Public Copyright based on initiatives that were funded from the public purse?