Mark Goodge added this as a comment to the data.gov.uk post, but it seems worth making more visible. So here it is:

“While the launch of data.gov.uk is a big step in the right direction, the government’s response to the petition inspired by the forced closure of ernestmarples.com has been pathetic. As a consequence, I’ve created a new petition which seeks to focus more tightly on the Postzon data (the data use by ernestmarples in their API). This can be found at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/geopostcode/.”

That’s one that’s definitely worth getting behind. Head over there and …do whatever the verb is for petitioning someone. Is it petition?

The official launch yesterday of data.gov.uk, with an index of 2,500 datasets provided by government departments, is fantastic news – and a significant milestone for the Free Our Data campaign.

It’s worth remembering how far we’ve come since 9 March 2006, when we kicked off the campaign in Guardian Technology with Give us back our crown jewels:

Imagine you had bought this newspaper for a friend. Imagine you asked them to tell you what’s in the TV listings – and they demanded cash before they would tell you. Outrageous? Certainly. Yet that is what a number of government agencies are doing with the data that we, as taxpayers, pay to have collected on our behalf. You have to pay to get a useful version of that data. Think of Ordnance Survey’s (OS) mapping data: useful to any business that wanted to provide a service in the UK, yet out of reach of startup companies without deep pockets.

This situation prevails across a number of government agencies. Its effects are all bad. It stifles innovation, enterprise and the creativity that should be the lifeblood of new business. And that is why Guardian Technology today launches a campaign – Free Our Data. The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies.

And further on:

[The consultancy] Pira [carrying out a study for the EU] pointed out that the US’s approach brings enormous economic benefits. The US and EU are comparable in size and population; but while the EU spent €9.5bn (£6.51bn) on gathering public sector data, and collected €68bn selling and licensing it, the US spent €19bn – twice as much – and realised €750bn – over 10 times more. [Peter] Weiss [who wrote a study comparing the US and UK] pointed out: “Governments realise two kinds of financial gain when they drop charges: higher indirect tax revenue from higher sales of the products that incorporate the … information; and higher income tax revenue and lower social welfare payments from net gains in employment.”

Happily, that argument has been driven through Whitehall by the efforts of Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. I interviewed Berners-Lee for the Guardian: see the video or read my account of how they did it.

So is that it? Is the campaign over? No, not at all. There are plenty of holdouts: UK Hydrographic Office is complicated (because it buys in third-party data which it then resells), yet even so one would think there should be information that it collects about British coastal waters which could be released as having public benefit.

Similarly postcodes, where there is some notable opposition to making any of the datasets free. The easiest one would be PostZon, which simply holds geolocations for each postcode plus data about which health and administrative boundary it lies inside; that’s nothing like as extensive (or valuable) as the full Postcode Address File (PAF).

But there’s really strong resistance against making anything from the Royal Mail available for free, and one detects Lord Mandelson’s hand in this.

If you haven’t yet had your say on the OS consultation, Harry Metcalfe has created a terrific tool for doing precisely that at osconsult.ernestmarples.com. Go along and make your views heard.

Does this sound at all familiar?

Not all local governments appreciate the rise of GIS-driven advocacy, especially when their own data is used as a hammer against them, and they have begun to restrict public access. Some have pulled data off the Web in the alleged interest of national security; others charge exorbitant fees to produce it or deliver jumbled masses of data that are difficult to manage or decipher.

Turns out though that it’s not from the UK, but the US, from a fascinating article about how GIS helps to demonstrate discrimination being practised by towns and cities – and how when that is revealed by mapping, the reaction tends not to be to get rid of the discrimination, but to get rid of the troublesome access to the data that reveals it. After all, it’s so much cheaper to do the one than the other:

Mebane, the Cedar Grove Institute’s first case study of municipal discrimination, passed an Infrastructure Information Security Policy shortly after the study was published; the policy limited infrastructure data access to qualified engineering firms and town agencies. The city of Modesto, Calif., locked in a legal underbounding battle, pulled its infrastructure data off the Internet after the lawsuit was filed, citing national security grounds. “There’s no conceivable national security interest in where the traffic lights are in Modesto,” scoffs Ben Marsh, the institute’s chief mapmaker. A recent appellate ruling in California rejected a similar national-security rationale, as well as a copyright argument by Santa Clara County, but whether that opinion stands as precedent remains to be seen.

However…

Though restrictions on access to government data could prove troublesome, advocacy groups that use GIS have already been finding data sources outside of government. In particular, data collected by community residents have become an effective supplement to the “official story,” as University of Washington professor Sarah Elwood calls government data.

Elwood has used GIS not only to map problems but to build the capacity of underserved and disadvantaged communities to advocate on their own behalf. Simple walking surveys that catalogue infrastructural deficiencies — potholes in sidewalks, missing stop signs, burned-out streetlights — fill gaps in the public record that mask actual conditions on the ground. With locally produced data, Elwood says, “You can tell a very detailed and very current, compelling story about neighborhood needs.”

If that reminds you at all of fixmystreet, it ought to – that’s precisely the sort of idea it sprang from.

A few things that strike us as we read through the consultation and impact assessment (links in previous posts).

Impact assessment:

Ordnance Survey generates most of its revenue from business and the public sector; in 2008/9 they each accounted for 46 per cent of the organisation’s total revenue. Consumers, through the sale of paper maps in retailing channels, accounted for the remaining 8 per cent of sales.

Impact assessment:

Ordnance Survey generates revenues from its products through licensing arrangements either directly with customers, or indirectly through licensed partners and through retail distributors. The direct customer channel accounts for two-thirds of Ordnance Survey’s trading revenue and includes various collective purchase agreements and major private sector users such as the utility companies. Approximately 25 per cent of Ordnance Survey’s trading revenue is generated though the indirect partner channel.

Impact assessment:

Separately, there are imbalances in Ordnance Survey’s current pricing model which may be causing inefficient allocation of resources. Firstly, Ordnance Survey currently charges private sector customers of its large-scale products significantly more than comparable government customers. The higher prices being paid by the private sector may potentially have restricted consumption to the less price sensitive users, impacting the economic benefit to the economy. Secondly, the payment allocation mechanism employed by government generates a weak price signal to Ordnance Survey from individual government users within the collective agreements.

Now that’s a really interesting one. Private sector pays more than government? I hadn’t heard that before. Payment mechanism generates a weak price signal?

Impact assessment:

[OS] already has a cost reduction programme underway as part of its existing business strategy, but any long-term strategic option would seek to introduce a framework that enhances cost transparency and provides incentives to pursue further efficiency gains.

More as we come across them…

What interesting reading the impact assessment of the DCLG consultation on making OS data free is. Clearly some arms have been twisted in the Treasury to make it happen – Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, almost surely in the driving seat there.

On the option being chosen (which is explicitly not the one that was examined in the “Cambridge study”, which looked at the benefits of releasing large-scale data, not the “mid-scale” data being proposed) the cost seems to be that government costs rise somewhat, while costs to the commercial sector fall.

From the document (on the impact assessment page):

ANNUAL COSTS

Lost OS revenue from OS Free data being made free: £19-24m (govt would fund this on a cost plus basis, amounting to £6-9m).

Increased government charges for large-scale data: £28-34m (price rebalancing based on number of datasets used by public and private sector).

One-off (Transition) Yrs: £ tbc

Average Annual Cost (excluding one-off): £47-58m

Total Cost (PV) £391-482m

Other key non-monetised costs by ‘main affected groups’ Transition costs to Ordnance Survey, government departments and businesses of moving to new model. There would be impacts on third party providers (see Competition Assessment, Annex 1).

ANNUAL BENEFITS

Description and scale of key monetised benefits by ‘main affected groups’: gain to business and consumers from OS large-scale data being made cheaper: £28-34m if assume price rebalancing is revenue neutral.

Gain from OS Free data being made available: £19-24m.

Average Annual Benefit (excluding one-off) £47-58m

Total Benefit (PV) £391-482m

Other key non-monetised benefits by ‘main affected groups’: The lower charges to businesses and consumers for large-scale data, and the free data should increase demand and hence welfare. Entry and innovation should occur in the market for geographical information. These welfare benefits have not been quantified (Pollock report focuses on releasing large-scale data).

And finally:

Key Assumptions/Sensitivities/Risk: Modelling assumptions: some substitution from paid-for to free data; lost revenue by OS due to competition from new derived products. Not yet determined how the revenue shortfall will be covered from government (i.e. who will pay and how). So for now assume no change in demand, but will estimate this for the final IA.

Price Base Year 2009

Time Period Years 10

Net Benefit Range (NPV) -

NET BENEFIT (NPV Best estimate) £0

Thanks to a little bird at an interested organisation, we now know that the DCLG has opened its consultation on OS data.

It’s at http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/corporate/ordnancesurveyconsultation, where we learn that the closing date is 17 March 2010 (and the opening date is today, 23 December 2009).

Consultation paper on the Government’s proposal to open up Ordnance Survey’s data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.

The consultation document itself weighs in at 2.2MB of PDF and 91 pages.

As ever, let us know your thoughts.

Update: and don’t miss the Impact Assessment paper – here’s the PDF of the Impact Assessment – which for some strange reason isn’t linked from the main page.

I’ve been researching the apparent hack of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), where a huge amount of email going back more than a decade, plus huge numbers of documents, have been released onto the internet – they’re indexed on various sites in searchable form and through Wikileaks, for example.

What I find interesting is some of the discussion around it. There have been multiple freedom of information (FOI) requests to the CRU from people who want to examine the underlying data used to make the analysis about human-driven global warming.

You’d think it would be straightforward. Science operates by data leading to theory leading to prediction leading to test against data, with a parallel process of independent test against the same data. So you’d think that access to the data would be a key thing.

Lots of Freedom of Information requests have thus come into the CRU demanding (that’s the word) the original data used for the papers. But the CRU has turned them down. Why? Because, UEA says, it came from weather organisations which charge for their datasets – and restrict those datasets’ redistribution.

Read for yourself at the CRU Data Availability page:

Since the early 1980s, some NMSs [national meteorological services], other organizations and individual scientists have given or sold us (see Hulme, 1994, for a summary of European data collection efforts) additional data for inclusion in the gridded datasets, often on the understanding that the data are only used for academic purposes with the full permission of the NMSs, organizations and scientists and the original station data are not passed onto third parties.

And:

In some of the examples given, it can be clearly seen that our requests for data from NMSs have always stated that we would not make the data available to third parties. We included such statements as standard from the 1980s, as that is what many NMSs requested.

The inability of some agencies to release climate data held is not uncommon in climate science. The Dutch Met Service (KNMI) run the European Climate Assessment and Dataset (ECA&D, http://eca.knmi.nl/) project. They are able to use much data in their numerous analyses, but they cannot make all the original daily station temperature and precipitation series available because of restrictions imposed by some of the data providers

CRU insists it wants to make the data available:

We receive numerous requests for these station data (not just monthly temperature averages, but precipitation totals and pressure averages as well). Requests come from a variety of sources, often for an individual station or all the stations in a region or a country. Sometimes these come because the data cannot be obtained locally or the requester does not have the resources to pay for what some NMSs charge for the data. These data are not ours to provide without the full permission of the relevant NMSs, organizations and scientists. We point enquirers to the GHCN web site. We hope in the future that we may be able to provide these data, jointly with the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, subject to obtaining consent for making them available from the rights holders. In developing gridded temperature datasets it is important to use as much station data as possible to fully characterise global- and regional-scale changes. Hence, restricting the grids to only including station data that can be freely exchanged would be detrimental to the gridded products in some parts of the world.

The problem arises because the centre has been running in this way since the 1980s – before the internet reached even most universities, and when the culture of “pay for data” (because it was so hard to acquire, and so jealously guarded) was much more ingrained.

But it is a problem that needs to be overcome. The CRU has all sorts of PR difficulties because it hasn’t grasped this nettle – which needs to be grasped so that it can finally get past any questions about its research. There are people who aren’t satisfied at being told that the data needed to investigate a scientific paper can’t be passed on because of long-lost contracts. (We wouldn’t be very impressed by that if we were told it either.)

Paying for public data: it’s never a good idea. Especially when it creates problems like this.

Ordnance Survey says it’s for the Department of Communities and Local Government that’s in charge of the consultation over making its data free….

According to this Parliamentary answer, DCLG thinks so too:

The question:

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative)

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with reference to the announcement of 17 November 2009 on the Making Public Data Public initiative, when he expects to begin the consultation regarding access to Ordnance Survey data.

The answer from the DCLG minister responsible:

Ian Austin (Minister of State (the West Midlands), Regional Affairs; Dudley North, Labour)

We expect the consultation to be launched during the week beginning 14 December 2009.

That’s this week. This week is almost over. What, it takes a week to launch a consultation? There are international experts who can do it quicker. Meanwhile I tried phoning the DCLG press office (no reply on multiple lines) and emailing it (no response).

Helluva way to organise a consultation.

The Department of Communities and Local Government is, apparently, in charge of the consultation over making OS data free.

The plan was of course that the consultation would begin “in December”.

December’s here and we haven’t seen much sign. Anyone else? We’ve put a call in to find out…

(If you need reminding about the case for making data free, see our other pages on the site, such as the articles page or the “Case for free“. Perhaps we do need to update them in the light of the studies of the past couple of years…)

The BBC has a piece saying that “postcodes” will be free from 2010:

Currently organisations that want access to datasets that tie postcodes to physical locations cannot do so without incurring a charge.

Following a brief consultation, the postcode information is set to be freed in April 2010.

….

The dataset that is likely to be freed is that which ties postcodes to geographic locations. Many more commercial organisations use the Postcode Address File (PAF) that ties post codes to addresses. Currently access to either data set incurs a charge.

In October 2009 the Royal Mail took legal action that cut off the access many websites had to PAF data.

(You might remember that one.)(

Sites that used the postcode feed included Job Centre Pro Plus, HealthWare (locates nearby pharmacies and hospitals), Planning alerts.com (monitors planning applications), Straight Choice (finds out who sent political leaflets).

That’s quickly contradicted however by the email that came around from the Royal Mail, noted by Steve Feldman, coming from Giles Finnemore, Head of Marketing at the Address Management Unit of the Royal Mail:

You may be aware of a story on the BBC website today that Government is planning to give anyone free access to postcode data.

Access to postcodes is already, and will continue to be, free to every citizen via www.royalmail.com/postcodes4free.

(Which is a nonsense. It’s true, but it’s also nonsensical, because the postcodes4free page requires registration and will only give you a limited number of postcode lookups in a 24-hour period. Which, if you think about it, is absurd: why does the Royal Mail want to make it difficult to address letters? You need to have an address list if you want to generate postcodes; if you didn’t have the postcodes, where did you get the addresses?)

For the avoidance of doubt PAF(r), the Postcode Address File, remains the intellectual property of Royal Mail and is supplied and used under licence. The new and recently published licences come into effect from April 2010. There are no plans for that to change.

Maintaining a world class postal address file requires significant ongoing investment and it is right that organisations who obtain value from using the file pay to do so.

We are aware of no plans for Government to pay Royal Mail for businesses and organisations to use our address file.

And it’s also contradicted by the Royal Mail’s press release page, which at present (December 9) has nothing about postcodes.

However, it may well be that the PostZon file – or more precisely, the long/lat lookups for every postcode – will be available for free next April.

Hey, look, even the Daily Telegraph – hardly a home of the idea of the free lunch – is reprinting Breaking Views pieces which point out that making data free brings bigger benefits.

UK map giveaway throws bread upon the waters pretty much sings from our songbook:

The Met Office and the Ordnance Survey are unlikely candidates to stimulate another revolution. The weather forecasts may be accurate (sometimes) and the maps beautiful, but as businesses, neither is going anywhere. This is no surprise, since neither is really suited to becoming a proper commercial enterprise.

Yet the data they own is, literally, invaluable. Made freely available, all sorts of would-be entrepreneurs could exploit it to build businesses beyond the dreams of the public sector. The slightly geeky approach needed to be a successful internet entrepreneur is commonplace among mapaholics and weather nuts. Given the raw material, they could make a thousand businesses bloom.

The proposal unveiled this week is vague – a consultation document is promised later this month. The ability of the civil servants to emasculate any good idea should never be underestimated. But this is one whose time has come.

Given their tiny profits, selling off the Ordnance Survey and Met Office would raise minimal amounts. Giving away the data will undermine profits, but the benefits in terms of corporate taxes should be much larger.

Thanks. We knew you couldn’t keep a good idea down.

Let’s just remind ourselves what it was that Sir Rob Margetts, chair of Ordnance Survey, said at the launch of OS’s proposed new strategy (which is now in little pieces all over the floor since Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee announced the end of derived data and the freeing up of mid-scale mapping, but anyway) back in April:

“We came to conclusion that the cost to government in the first five years [of a free data model] would be between £500m and £1 billion. That wasn’t the only reason that we discarded it. We did, with outside help, a review of equivalent organisations around the world.“

Who, I then asked, was the “outside help”? OS responded:

With regard to the International Comparison of Geographical Information Trading Models Study, outside help was provided by senior officials of those Institutions contacted.

In the case of the United States of America, as senior officials of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) were unavailable, Mr. David Cowen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, kindly provided us with an in-depth overview of the state of public sector GI data in the United States, including USGS. Mr Cowan is a former chair of the Mapping Science Committee of the United States National Research Council and is chair of the National Research Council’s Committee for the study of Land Parcel Databases.

The document was also reviewed by an internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping who agreed with the analysis and conclusions.

This latter bit intrigued us. An “internationally recognised expert”, eh? Except it turned out that he or she did not want to be identified, although he or she works or has worked full-time for a foreign mapping agency, and read the study for free. And that OS transacted everything with the expert by spoken word:

A copy of the report was provided to the person concerned and engagement on this matter was conducted orally with no permanent record made of these conversations.

And now in response to my latest Freedom of Information request for

copies of all emails and/or documents internally relating to the decision to choose this person – for example, discussion of who would be suitable candidates or who would not be suitable candidates to carry out the review of the report

OS replies:

There was no decision process in place to find suitable candidates. An opportunity presented itself to request the opinion of a global expert in this field which was undertaken orally. The resultant opinion was expressed orally and there was no permanent record made of these conversations.

So here’s what happens. You have a report. You happen to bump into an old mate. “Hey, want to read my report?” you say. “Sure,” they say. They read it. “Seems OK,” they say. You go back to your office and tell people “I met X who says it’s fine.” Even though the report is a thrown-together farrago of disconnected information about various national mapping agencies and their charging methods, combined with an unrelated chunk of poorly displayed data about national GDP versus national R&D expenditure, which cannot by any reasonable measure be claimed to justify anything about any charging model.

This then becomes “The document was also reviewed by an internationally recognised expert in Geographical Information and National Mapping who agreed with the analysis and conclusions.”

If there is anyone at Ordnance Survey who is prepared to defend this course of events, could they please get in touch? Or even the international expert, who is very welcome to comment anonymously to explain whether they think OS’s representation of their opinion is justified. Comments are open.

TBL and Nigel Shadbolt, who are together pushing along the open data idea in government, have an article in the Times (London) of November 18 about the benefits of free data, following on from the announcement yesterday:

Data has a particular value in that you can combine it with other data to discover new things. When in 1854 John Snow took the deaths from a cholera outbreak in London and plotted them on a map, he was able to illustrate the connection between the quality of the source of water and cholera — the world changed. In March the Department for Transport released three years’ worth of data about the location of accidents involving cyclists. Within 24 hours someone had converted this data to create cycle-accident route planners that avoid the black spots.

Government data is a valuable resource that we have already paid for. We are not talking about personal data but data that tells us, for example, about the amount and type of traffic on our roads, where the accidents are, how much is spent on areas where these accidents occur. This is data that has already been collected and paid for by the taxpayer, and the internet allows it to be distributed much more cheaply than before. Governments can unlock its value by simply letting people use it. This is beginning to happen in a number of countries, notably in the US under the Obama Administration, and in June Gordon Brown asked us to advise the Government on how to make rapid progress here.

(The fun thing here being that OS would argue that its data has not been collected and paid for by the taxpayer because it’s a trading fund. Unfortunately this doesn’t hold up in front of the point that (a) almost all of its data was collected while it was not a trading fund (b) half its revenues do come from the taxpayer, in the form of licences from public organisations.)

As all of this data becomes available, we have to look for the joins between it. A new set of standards for the web is emerging that allows us to link data from different sources. Everyone knows that web pages have addresses that identify them, allowing you to navigate around and find what you want. To make the web of linked open data work we also need to give identifying addresses to the objects and properties that make up the basic information in pages, spreadsheets or databases.

Think about the practical applications. If Companies House referred to companies using these new open, uniform identifiers, then other people who needed to talk about companies could use these whenever they referred to a company. If all websites that make data available about companies point to the same identifier for a company, then it’s possible to pull that data together very easily — whether its data about stock price, a product or a director. This is one of the core principles at the heart of the web of linked data.

None of this works unless the data is there in the first place. But when it is, innovation flourishes. Maybe someone uses the web to show schools close to you and their Ofsted reports, or the planning applications that might affect you, or the allotments available to use, or the crime rates in your area. Data is beginning to drive the Government’s websites. But without a consistent policy to make it available to others, without the use of open standards and unrestrictive licences for reuse, information stays compartmentalised and its full value is lost.

So there you have it: the free data concept is right there at the heart of government, with extra semantic web power from the person who invented it. That’s good. That’s very good.

Do we scent victory? Hell yeah. It seems that the prime minister plus the chief secretary of the Treasury plus the inventor of the world wide web collectively outrank Vanessa Lawrence, and so Gordon Brown was able to declare at a seminar at No.10 yesterday (to which I was invited, thanks for asking) that

Today, some of you may know, we are opening up Ordnance Survey information – one of the first recommendations that Tim Berners‑Lee made to us with Nigel Shadbolt in the work that they are doing. We are making Ordnance Survey material available to the up to a certain level in a way that it was not available free of charge before.

The Guardian has the story: Ordnance Survey maps to go free online:

The government is to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April, in a victory for the Guardian’s three-year Free Our Data campaign. The move will bring the UK into line with the free publication of maps that exists in the US.

Gordon Brown announced the change at a joint event in London today with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, who is now information tsar advising on the handing over of private government data to the public.

The government has been inspired by the success of crime mapping where “data openness” is helping citizens assess the safety of geographical areas.

Today’s announcement will be followed by a speech, due next week by the chief secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, explaining how the freeing up of data, alongside the scaling back of other functions of central government, could lead to a “smarter state”.

Our understanding is that Liam Byrne was key in getting this pushed throughL since it involves financial risk – OS won’t be getting that income – the Treasury has to approve it.

Key points: it involves “mid-scale” maps from 1:10,000 upwards; and it kills off the “derived data” rows that government departments and everyone else has been having for so long. Derived data will have a stake through its heart.

Oh, and – this “free” will extend to being free for commercial use. That’s right, you’ll be able to build a business with it. Though it’s not clear yet whether you’d be able to take the maps and create *printed* ones. Must ask about that.

There will be a consultation starting in December. We’d urge any customer of OS to add in their views. And we’d urge any would-be customer who would otherwise not use the data to add their views too.

Quite where this leaves OS’s “hybrid strategy” isn’t clear. And OS doesn’t seem very clear about it either. Vanessa Lawrence wasn’t at No.10, and nor was anyone from OS, which seems surprising – you’d think they’d want to bask in the reflected glory of being praised by Tim Berners-Lee for the quality and usefulness of their data, surely?

When we asked this morning how much foregone revenue this means (since obviously giving away maps you used to charge for means less income), OS said it was “not in a position to make any comment at this time”, which seems surprising, again, because you’d think that it would have given Liam Byrne very clear indications of how far the roof would fall in if it were to do this.

Here’s the best shot that Google Translate has come up with in translating the web page at the Norwegian mapping service announcing its forthcoming free map service. There are some important extra points which might be worth noting – such as that it’s going to be for an experimental period of six months in the first instance. (And you’ll have to allow for the fact that it’s not quite been translated into English.)

Free map services [Published: 12.11.09, Updated: 12.11.09]

Now everyone can access the latest maps around the clock. Together with our partners we are releasing through the Norwegian Mapping Authority a number of their map services – by Mapping Manager Anne Cathrine Frøstrup

From 1 December, you can click on the state map sites and get direct access to digital map services – absolutely free.

“We have the best and freshest maps foundation in Norway, and now we share this with everyone. This shows that cartography is visibly for the benefit of society, and is entirely in line with government policy of more openness,” said Hydrographic chief Anne Cathrine Frøstrup.

Map Services released, covering both sea and land, and regularly updated. They should meet the needs of the vast majority of us.

Hoping for creativity: It is free to develop their own functions related to the maps, and in the long run, this can provide a range of new opportunities.

“Be creative and use our maps to develop new exciting additional services,” said Frøstrup.

With the release of the maps she hopes that creativity will flourish. Inventive souls can tie together maps and other map information in new and clever ways.

Availability cookbook: with some computer knowledge, it is possible to use the new map services. On the website of the Norwegian Mapping Authority, you will find a basic cookbook that gives you the recipe for how to integrate the various solutions.

The links to the services will operate from 1 December.

In the first instance we are talking about a test period of six months. The scheme will be constantly evaluated and improved. Works and services so we have planned, will the offer be made permanent. [Not sure how this last sentence should be interpreted.]