Your help is needed to fight a move that could see all the geographic information in Europe locked away and available only to well-heeled corporations, but not to activists, nonprofits, individuals and startups.
The EU's INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.
Geographic data is a key to unlocking information collected by government on behalf of the public – census,
voting, planning, utilities, environmental, transport information.
Google Maps/Earth mashups are just starting to show us what can be
done by overlaying different kinds of environmental and social
information over freely available base maps.
The Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee of the
European Parliament gets the chance to roll back some of these changes
next Tuesday (21st March).
An open letter from Public Geodata urges the Committee to consider this
not as a niche technical issue, but as a core component of the
management of civil society in the information age. We need your signature — and particularly the signature of your organisation — on this letter to prevent the basic information about the lands where we live from being hijacked by a few companies to all our detriment.
We are writing to convey our concerns regarding the current draft of the INSPIRE directive on establishing a common framework for sharing geographic information in Europe. This is an important issue as it is estimated that fully 80% of all information collected by government has a spatial component and geographic information is needed for environmental, census, and transport purposes among many others. Moreover state-collected geographic information is a public good and, as demonstrated by several studies, open access to it is the only way to realize its full social and commercial potential for Europe.
However since the first draft of INSPIRE, a set of amendments have been introduced which restrict the rights of the public to access, or even know about the existence of, geographic information that they have paid to collect. Thus in its current form, as found in the Council's common position, the directive not only fails to promote open access but risks doing the very opposite.
This would be a disastrous outcome and one which ran against the very purpose of INSPIRE. As the Commission itself, has stated in this regard: "the common position could have the effect of reducing rather than increasing the availability of spatial data. … The text of the common position leaves too much scope for data providers to refuse to give public access to their data and share it with other authorities."
(Thanks, Jo!)
