Yesterday, I wrote a rather sweary and ill-tempered blog post about the Ordnance Survey’s attempts to change its spots. Lets take a look at what exactly is vexing me about the Ordnance Survey, GeoVation and OpenSpaces.
The Problem – Derived Data
This year’s budget was the government’s chance to follow up on the Cabinet Office’s own findings:
There is a high demand for map-based public sector information services. But the complex and legalistic licensing and charging regime offered by the Ordnance Survey is acting as a barrier, both real and perceived, to innovation in this area…The taskforce judges that the charging and licencing regime stifles innovation in public service delivery and economic activity.
This is no radical, everything must be free open-source die hard saying this. It is the Cabinet Office, the ‘head office of governement’, saying that the Ordnance Survey must change its licensing regime. On the one hand we have OpenStreetMap, where the data is free and I can do pretty much anything I like with the data, and then we have the OS with large up-front license fees and straightjacket like restrictions. Back to the Cabinet Office’s findings:
one large local authority expressed bewilderment to the Task Force that the location data for its own street furniture seemed to be owned by the Ordnance Survey. The Ordnance Survey often claims derived copyright in public service locations, often despite the original information coming from other public bodies.
Derived Data. The single most stifling element of the Ordnance Survey’s licensing regime is the practice of claiming copyright over any data derived from an OS base map. This has massive implications to anyone in a public sector body, or anyone who wishes to use their data. Any geographical data created by a public sector body (who almost exclusively use OS data) is not their’s to do what they like with, it is claimed by the Ordnance Survey under their copyright. Local authorities cannot share the location of its rubbish bins with the public, does this sound absurd to anybody else? Derived Data stops dead any effective sharing of public geographic data, and any innovation that would come from it.
The Response
With large institutions change is slow, the budget and trading fund review gave the OS 12 months to reassess the way they operate and come up with some answers. And sure enough, in May the OS’ response came, “The Business Strategy Consultation”:
It has been agreed with Ministers to focus the business around five key areas. These are:
1. Promote innovation for economic benefit and social engagement
2. Increase the use of Ordnance Survey data
3. Support the sharing of information across the whole of the public sector
4. Increase efficiency to develop a sustainable business for the future
5. Enhance value through the creation of an innovative trading entityThe overall aim of this new business strategy is to provide the best balance between making information more widely available and creating a sustainable future for Ordnance Survey and the wider market.
A sustainable future for the Ordnance Survey cannot be based around any licensing regime that acts as a lock-in to their customers. We currently have a situation where if you have used OS data, you cannot stop paying their license fees as your data, that you have created, has been partially derived from the OS base maps. I do not wish to enter any debate about funding models, the sustainability of a national mapping agency or any other side issue.
The practice of claiming copyright for derived data must end if any of the Cabinet Office’s or the Ordnance Survey’s new objectives are to be met.
OpenSpace – Not Open
So what exactly have the Ordnance Survey done? Aside from some clumsy youtube marketing of the consultation, so far the answer to the points above has been the launch of the OS Open Space API and the GeoVation events. OpenSpace is an online mapping platform, aimed at non-profit making organisations. The maps are perfectly good, its a nice technical achievement. GeoVation is an attempt by the OS to promote the use of geographical information (ie Ordnance Survey data) to those who might not already be using it. Fine.
The launch of these services are being sold as the answer to all of the OS’ problems, and yet we have heard no mention of derived data. Not one. However, there is a large section on derived data in the Terms and Conditions of the OpenSpace API, some of which I will publish here:
5.4 Derived Data
5.4.1 You may create Derived Data, and You may permit End User’s to create Derived Data, in connection with Your Web Application. In the event that You or any End User creates Derived Data, such Derived Data shall be owned by Us, save that if any Derived Data is created which is a severable improvement (as defined by Commission Regulation (EC) No 772/2004, known as the Technology Transfer Block Exemption) of the Ordnance Survey Data then such Derived Data shall be owned by the person or entity creating the same.
So much for being open, any data created using the OpenSpace API is claimed under OS copyright as derived data. I would like to show an example of why I cannot use OpenSpace. Earlier this year I put together a mapping application for FutureSonic09 the arts, music and environmental festival in Manchester. It was a fun, participative experiment to crowdsource data from the public to try and measure the urban heat island effect of Manchester, called Climate Bubbles. People go out, blow some bubbles and chase them and show us on the map how far they went and in what direction:
Even with a simple application like this, created for the Met Office and Lancaster University, I cannot use the OpenSpace API. If I were to use OpenSpace, then Ordnance Survey claims derived data copyright over whatever data the public contributes. Now I cannot share this data, or use this data myself if I or the third party are not paying Ordnance Survey license fees. So much for the goals of “promoting innovation for economic benefit and social engagement” or “supporting the sharing of information across the whole of the public sector”.
GeoVation – Open Wash
So what is GeoVation?
“Through GeoVation, Ordnance Survey® will offer for the first time public access to its digital mapping products for people developing new ideas.”
Lets go back to a lecture that Tim Berners Lee, the government’s newly crowned open data Czar, gave in 2006 where he made the case for access to raw OS data:
“There’s a moral argument that says, for a well-run country, we should know where we are, where things are, and that data should be available…I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data”
Tim Berners Lee said that in 2006. It is now 2009 and we finally have some kind of programme where the OS seems to be offering some kind of access to the data. However, so far this is a whole lot of wash. By that I mean the sort of “green wash” we see with various large energy companies claiming to be green. This is “open wash”, the Ordnance Survey is offering a little bit of access to the data, yet absolutely no freedom to use it.
OpenSpace and GeoVation are both exercises in showing that the Ordnance Survey can be relevant in a world where data and information are shared and free flowing. This is simply not the case while the OS claims copyright over derived data. I will repeat myself:
The practice of claiming copyright for derived data must end if any of the Cabinet Office’s or the Ordnance Survey’s new objectives are to be met.
See our new open data champion, Tim Berners Lee, talk about the possibilities in a world where data is open, shared and free flowing:
Tags: geodata, Ordnance Survey, Power of Information Taskforce
The war of words continues – at the risk of being vilified as an ostrich, a couple of comments (some of which I have shared with Chris in the past in person). I would concur with Chris’ underlying message: that suggestions that something concrete on derived data can emerge simply due to GeoVation suddenly being on the scene is to attribute too much to this “action”.
However, there is no denying the very real challenge of defining what is meant by derived data and this is the chief casualty of the current polarised debate.
Plenty of effort has gone into voicing the issue but less into moving the issue towards a solution where the social/cultural opportunities and value inherent in the kind of derived data you describe can be realised. It is a crying shame (even as critical friend) that OS haven’t been able to accelerate this strand of their work as it would get the monkey off their back and rightly open up these uses.
However, as ever, the devil is in the detail and as alluded to in this case it is the start and end point of what ‘derived data’ is. As noted the funding model is for the moment at least a given; so it is that OS is duty bound to ‘protect’ its assets. On this basis one can understand the reluctance of an organisation to allow a definition of derived data that would include every building in OS MasterMap (OS’ most detailed geospatial content) while at the same time ridiculing it for denying the kinds of examples trailed by Chris. And there are a huge raft of derived data scenarios between these two…..it is an interesting challenge once you get up close!
This duality (and the shades in between) makes it impossible to assert that “the practice of claiming copyright for derived data must end”. Even the Free Our Data campaign tacitly recognises this but tricky subjects do not snappy headlines make!
You have usefully shed some light onto what for many is the key and sometimes forgotten issue – derived data does demand greater attention. However, a solution that meets these challenges demands more constructive noises off.
There is a relatively simple way to define derived information, and that is to ask what is not… If i create a new feature that is not represented as a feature on the original map/dataset it cannot be derived from it. If the OS would just agree with this it world more things forward.. but then we have been asking for this for years…
As some point you have to move beyond cock-up territory to conspiracy…
Under the current trading fund model it seems reasonable that the OS should continue to protect its data from plagiarism, ie people deriving a new street map from their street maps etc. The OS must however be generous in allowing people to geo-code there own features from OS maps without claiming derived data-rights on that data. I say generous because there is a grey area here but if they are not generous then they will become irrelevant for many purposes. They must allow a local authority to locate all their cycle racks using OS data and use it free of OS copyright. They must allow the Woodland Trust to create outlines of the woods they manage using OS data and use it free of OS restrictions. Possibly they should allow Sustrans to derive all the nation cycle routes from OS data and use it free of OS restrictions – ok so that might be getting tricky but I think they should.
I say ‘must’ in some of the above cases because if they don’t allow this soon, then authorities and businesses will start supporting OpenStreetMap with a vengeance to become good enough to make the OS redundant for many purposes and that is not in their interest. Look at the story of the Microsoft monopoly and the rise of Linux to see what happens.
They do in fact allow some people to derive data – they are sponsors of Geograph (http://www.geograph.org.uk/) and OS maps have been used to geocode over 1 million photos and the resulting work are published ccbysa with their blessing: http://blog.dixo.net/2006/10/23/geograph-creative-commons-and-ordnance-survey-revisited/ … however it seems they have not actually given up their rights, they only seem to be allowing geograph to do it but still reserve the right to sue anyone who creates a map from the geograph data. This is strange because the ccbysa license is very clear about the rights given and don’t mention a list of things you can’t do and for which you will be sued.
The derived data clause means anyone (business, non-profit or public sector) who has read and understood the terms and conditions of ‘Open’ Space will not use it. Talk about an exercise in futility.
It’s a bit like the Oxford University Press claiming copyright on all the world’s English literature because they documented the definition of each of the words –
According to OS’s theory, every work that uses those words are a ‘derived works’.
OS have simply documented the definition of our land.