[Geodata] Good news for open source and open geodata from the UK

[Jo Walsh]

dear all, (pls forgive excited cross-posting),

The UK Government's response to the consultation on opening national 
mapping data has been published. A selection of datasets will be 
available from tomorrow, April 1st, free for re-use with no 
restrictions. This includes postcode coordinates, administrative 
boundaries and geographic names.

A nice summary of the government response can be seen here:
http://ernestmarples.com/blog/2010/03/government-response-to-ordnance-survey-consultation-published/

There's also positive news for Open Source GIS in the small print;
OS is going to take on the national-level INSPIRE data services,
build them with free software, and make their work available.

"3.28 Ordnance Survey will design, specify, create and acceptance test 
repeatable INSPIRE compliant hosted data services, together with an 
overarching portal to support the View and Metadata Services. These 
platforms will then be offered back to the community as Open Source 
software."

The open data release is not "the works", the largest scale data for 
which OpenStreetmap is the competition (branded MasterMap) is not yet 
included. But it is a great start and sets a terrific precedent for 
public access to state-collected geodata worldwide.

As postal code areas here typically span a few houses, and there's been 
a lot of contention about the "ownership" of the postcode data, this is 
a particularly valuable resource to see open licensed.

On the whole, w00t to the power of w00t.


jo
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