[Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Gavin Treadgold]

On 2009-12-07, at 15:26 , Bruce Bannerman wrote:
> We have data that we manage as data custodians, and as custodians, we choose not to allow others to edit that data for issues relating to data quality etc (In our business that is a valid concern). Therefore we're releasing 'whole' datasets as is. 

And can I therefore assume you're also selecting CC-ND (No Derivatives) to ensure that edits and/or modified data is not redistributed? ;)


> We have a couple of choices as to licenses:
> - go to a lawyer and draft a separate license agreement to allow access to the data.
> - use a commonly accepted license, e.g. a CC license, that our laywers will accept.

And we are trying to encourage more govt agencies in NZ to adopt commonly understood licences such as CC, and indeed we're getting support from within govt for this approach as well. The earlier link in this thread to NZ GOAL is a good case in point, and the release in July of the NZ Land Cover DB under CC3 was also a huge step forward.

Don't get me wrong, I think the fact that we've got govt adopting CC and promoting it as a modern form of Crown Copyright is great. It means that end users do not have to go and get a legal opinion on each custom licence that a government agency may produce.

I'm hopeful that we can get the best of both worlds by using CC as the common licensing framework, but also encouraging good practice with metadata, error reporting etc that isn't directly a licensing issue, but seems to come up any time we start talking licensing.

> The first option will have you going to your lawyer for a translation to see if it is OK to use. The second option (CC), should avoid that.

Exactly :) Now if we could just get the NZ Fire Service to wake up to that...


> Wrt Spatial Metadata, I believe that all spatial professionals have a responsibility to *maintain* and release a (url to their) quality metadata record with their data sets.

I'd actually like to see it bundled with the data as well, e.g. it should include the metadata file as well with shapfiles, GML etc. Of course online versions are good as well, but it should be directly bundled with downloaded data. As an emergency manager - we can't rely on having access to online URLs during an emergency when we may need to recheck the metadata of a particular layer. It must be bundled with the data itself.


> Wrt 'provenance' (isn't that part of the Metadata ;-) ), as a user of a spatial dataset, I'd prefer to know where that data came from and what its metadata had to say, particularly:

Yes, provenance is part of metadata - but it seems in discussions I've been involved in this year, that it is a particular subset of metadata that comes up again and again, so often warrants a little extra attention :)


On 2009-12-07, at 15:17 , John Smith wrote:
> ... over a proposed change to ODBL (Open DataBase License) and moving away from CC-BY-SA because it doesn't hold legal weight in some jurisdictions

I think this has also come about because some jurisdictions allow the copyrighting of databases, even if the databases are just of facts. Hence, additional licensing rights were required to ensure that the OSM data couldn't be put into a database form and copyrighted. (At least that is my very basic understanding from a quick glance at the issue a few months back.)


On 2009-12-07, at 15:13 , John Smith wrote:
> One way to look at this might be to look at how science has handled
> the issue, science is based on incremental steps made by people that
> come after your research.

Entirely agree, but I'm not yet sure that government agencies adopting a form of CC are yet prepared for citizens updating and producing improved datasets that are more accurate than publicly available sets. Just look at what the NZ Open GPS project has done to produce an improved road centreline dataset in NZ that is still removing errors from the LINZ road centrelines. (It is highly ironic that an individual within LINZ at the time was not even able to get them to correct data based on GPS tracklogs that he provided them, let alone members of the general public...)

Adopting CC is the start of a slope that is ultimately going to end up with government agencies having to either provide a process of accepting edits/corrections from citizens, or having citizens maintain their own more accurate derivations of datasets because the official release is not being funded to maintain it to an acceptable level of quality. I think the take-home point here is that funding needs to be made available to agencies to ensure that the owner of a dataset is able to accept end-user corrections. Note that not all datasets need this, but some such as roads, walking tracks etc change frequently and need corrections applied. Those derived sets that are the result of analysis and calculation are far less likely to require end-user correction - although this will depend on the changes in the factual datasets that are act as inputs. But the factual datasets will - we do after all live in dynamic communities, landscapes and infrastructure and we need agencies to reflect changes in these datasets in a timely manner.

Cheers Gav