[A2k] European Campaign against private ownership over Public Data

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

Within the framework of a new European initiative: INSPIRE,
Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (launched by the
European Commission to "make available relevant, harmonised and quality
geographic information to support formulation, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of Community policies with a territorial
dimension or impact"); Jo Walsh and Benjamin Henrion have started a
campaign to reform the current Inspire Directive Proposal to ensure that
publicly financed data (mainly geographic data, but also other) remains
public.

The website of the campaign informs that "on 23 January 2006, the
Council of European Union formally adopted a common position on the
Inspire Directive, which stipulates that Geographic Data collected by
National Mapping Agencies all over Europe should be owned by such
agencies and not by the Public.....While a lot of datasets are available
in the United States under a public domain licence, little geographic
data is available under open access terms in Europe but is instead made
available at monopoly prices by national mapping agencies..... The
proposed Directive will entrench a policy of charging citizens for
information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state
copyright over geographic information".

Campaign Website: http://www.publicgeodata.org/

Summary of the Inspire proposed Directive:
http://space.frot.org/docs/inspire_directive.html

More information =3D

Why Europe Needs to Provide its Own Public Geodata By Jo Walsh

Source: http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3D2107&trv=3D1

Last week, I asked my friend Norm Vine, a stalwart of the open source
GIS community, if he could introduce me to someone at the U.S.
Geological Survey who might be prepared to make a public statement about
public access to national mapping data being a good thing for the
national economy. He seemed genuinely perplexed for a moment, as if I'd
just asked him to put me in touch with a fish that might be prepared to
make a public statement on how water is a good thing for the marine ecology=
.

In the U.S., public access to geographic data, "geodata" for short, has
always been taken for granted as being part of the national heritage.
Norm suggested that in the U.S., one of the reasons to have a government
is to have good map data. George Washington himself was a surveyor and
mapmaker. The interior of the North American continent was unknown to
the colonists. In order to establish autonomy in the face of the
colonial powers, they had to create and share accurate spatial models of
where they were.

At that time, Europe was gripped by bitter feuds over scarce but
well-mapped resources. Quarrels resulted in attempts to gain access to
the external resources vital to victory. Different colonial powers
treated the maps that they made and collected very differently. Philip
II kept the national maps of Spain under lock and key. Maps were
powerful military technologies for both attack and defense, and thus
were kept as military secrets. The British Empire published its maps
openly and they were reprinted widely. When you look at the modern maps
of Newfoundland, of the whole North American Eastern Seaboard, it is the
British-applied names that have stayed with us to the present day.

Modern Europe is very different; the colonies are gone. In place of
internal competition is the ideal of free trade in goods and free
movement of citizens, a diplomatic association, and a co-prosperity
zone. European governments work together through the tripartite
structure that is the European Parliament, the European Commission and
the Council of Ministers in order to design common legislative standards
that will allow, or oblige, national agencies to co-operate. Sharing
geographic data across borders is a keystone in the European effort to
collaboratively manage resources, create fairer governance structures
and contribute to each others' economic prosperity.

The national mapping agencies (NMA) of Europe sometimes seem to be
living in the colonial past. Public geodata are kept under lock and key,
through copyright and commercial licensing terms that are prohibitive to
ordinary citizens and spare-time, free-software enthusiasts who want to
undertake amateur GIS projects. Europe's governing agencies, especially
those that collect census information and manage resource networks, find
it hard to cooperate. They speak different languages, use different
cadastral and spatial models, and use different technology platforms and
sets of standards internally. Europe's current loosely joined spatial
data infrastructures are not only unpredictable; they're not even
predictably unpredictable.

The proposed INSPIRE Directive (press release
<http://www.directionsmag.com/press.releases/index.php?duty=3DShow&id=3D119=
74>)
on establishing a common spatial data infrastructure in Europe is the
latest and greatest in a long series of initiatives undertaken by NMA
representatives to fix some of these problems. INSPIRE aims to establish
common standards for describing the physical world and the things in it,
and to establish a framework across which different agencies that
collect data can share data with one another. A common framework is
something that Europe badly needs to maintain integrity.

The terms in which INSPIRE is being dictated reflect the false dichotomy
which has troubled the internal governance of the European Union deeply
over the last year. In the red corner, the "Anglo-Saxon economic
liberalism" proposes(?) privatizing public services that used to be
managed by the state, regardless of whether the market will provide the
same and necessary level of service. In the blue corner, the
"old-fashioned centrist socialism=94 proposes(?) maintaining state
ownership of public support services, whether or not it makes functional
or financial sense to do so. If the European debate has to be a question
of taking sides, then the privatizing and liberalizing tendency is
"winning." It is using market logic and protective market instruments to
reinforce itself. Each time the INSPIRE Directive draft has gone to a
new stage in the co-decision process, the thematic types of data that it
covers decrease; therefore the options that the public will have to even
view images of geodata, let alone get access to them and work with them
in their own GISs, are decreasing. The second version of the INSPIRE
Directive has a new emphasis on protecting the intellectual property
rights of the agencies that collect and distribute public geodata.

NMAs are under a lot of pressure to perform well financially on
government spreadsheets. The data they collect, after all, have the
power to generate an immense quantity of new economic value, in
particular in the design of new kinds of intelligent transport systems
for goods and for people. Europe's GALILEO project, a global navigation
satellite system, is touted mostly for the transformational potential it
can affect on transportation systems. GALILEO is a good case for a
"middle way" in providing all citizens access to a free, public service,
overseen by government and maintained by private industrial efforts.
There is a guarantee that GALILEO will provide a useful free signal,
with ultra-high-accuracy signals available at a price, for crucial
infrastructural and safety-critical operations. GALILEO is also an
attempt to lessen Europe's growing economic and social dependency on the
GPS system provided by the U.S. government and its military agencies.
All the public domain mapping data that people all over the world are
trying to use to build the new geospatial Web - Landsat imagery, STRM
terrain models, the GeoNET gazetteer of world placenames - is provided
for free and in the public domain by the U.S. government and its
military agencies.

As Europe moves into the 21st century, it needs to design a common
spatial data infrastructure that works for all of its citizens. INSPIRE
is not that infrastructure. The NMAs that designed it are quite rightly
fearful for their role, with increasingly viable commercial alternatives
to the data they collect and provide on the one hand, and government
pressure to privatize formerly state-owned information infrastructure
and gain short term profit from it, on the other. INSPIRE does not
reflect the full debate around, or the full potential in, spatial data
infrastructure as a tremendous engine of research innovation, new kinds
of economic activity, and a reformed practice of civic engineering.

So far the debate has been largely polarized between "information wants
to be free!" and "you get what you pay for!" There are plenty of
alternative models that can exist. GALILEO indicates where a good one
may be - the offering of generalized geodata, lower-accuracy but still
usable for most applications, free to access and free for use by the
public. NMAs, or whatever kind of new agency succeeds them in the
information market, can charge large commercial players for
ultra-high-accuracy data and still find it possible to recoup some of
their costs. Many European academics, researchers, small business
persons and open source software developers are crying out for public
access to the geodata that describe their world. They offer many new and
accurate insights into how Europe can overcome the description problems
inherent in having 25 different spatial models in as many different
languages.

I started talking about this with Norm Vine, because I've been working
with Benjamin Henrion of the Foundation for Free Information
Infrastructures <http://www.ffii.org/>. Henrion worked hard to roll back
the Software Patents Directive that would have put the brakes on the
potential for small businesses and academics in Europe to create their
own software. Henrion and I are putting together a wiki website at which
people can: learn more about the history of INSPIRE; find out how to get
involved in the lobbying process; find others who consider INSPIRE to be
designed without proper public consultation and without consideration
for the negative economic and social effects that it may have. We've
also started a public petition to give to members of the European
Parliament. We=92re urging them to look again at what must appear to most
people outside of the geographic information industry to be a pretty
obscure technical directive. But they underestimate the impact it will
actually have on how Europe is managed and governed.

If you're in Europe, please support this effort by signing the petition
<http://rejectinspire.publicgeodata.org/>, talking to your non-GI
friends about it and asking them to sign it too. If you're outside
Europe, keep watching this space. The decisions made here and now about
the next generation of spatial data infrastructure may impact your
rights to get access to public geodata describing the world around you,
and faster than you think.


--
Judit Rius Sanjuan
judit.rius at cptech.org
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.: +1.202.332.2670, Ext 17 Fax: +1.202.332.2673