Welcome to the Free Our Data campaign blog
Welcome to the Free Our Data blog – a campaign started by the Guardian’s Technology supplement. If you don’t know about it, read Give us back our crown jewels, the article that kicked it off on March 9 2006.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Information World Review joins Free Our Data campaign (28 August 2007; score: 16.86%)
- Free access to science speeds its use; would the same happen with government data? (16 May 2006; score: 13.99%)
- Information World Review points to benefits of "fair use' on economy (20 September 2007; score: 11.97%)
- Using Gapminder to compare the countries studied by OS: how did they choose? (24 June 2009; score: 9.4%)
- Free Our Data: now on Twitter (15 May 2008; score: 8.72%)
March 16th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
The GPRD (General Practice Research Database) is a good example of how the public are being unknowingly duped into providing valuable data to a pseudo government agency. Most people won’t know whether their local GP provides patient data to the GPRD, and almost certainly won’t know that their GP is paid to provide that data. The real crime is that researchers and academics are then charged exhorbitant fees to access this valuable health data. So researchers are prevented from using the GPRD to help answer important medical questions, to the detriment of the very people unwittingly providing their personal data for free. Meanwhile pharmaceutical companies and American researchers with big budgets are the main users of our data. What could be a valuable public health resource benefitting the UK patients providing data is locked away and of most benefit to profit-driven drugs companies. Perhaps one way we could act to change this absurd situation is to charge GPs to use our personal data in this way. Or refuse to let your data go on to the GPRD? Why not ask your GP next time you see them…
March 16th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
It’s not just about data.
Look at the current problems with London Transport – or TfL as they are now – refusing to allow people to add, annotate and share the maps that they have paid for over the years.
Transport for London Steps up the Attacks
More public data that should be in the public domain.
Why should TfL have the exclusive rights to a Tube Map that has taken years to develop using tax payers money? Why can’t people recycle that resource freely.
TfL are quite happy to licence out the map to money making enterprises – but if the general public want to use their resources in interesting and novel ways for free – TfL say NO.
Nobody benefits
March 16th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
There is an article and survey on the http://www.datastandard.co.uk website concerning the licencing of the National Land and Property Gazetteer – which is a spatial database of all the addresses in England. Since this information was gathered by Local Government at the expense of the taxpayer, they are suggesting that it should be made available free of charge to all. The survey, targetted at Local Government professionals is currently 90% in favour of that.
March 16th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
I sent the following to the Ordnance Survey and my MP John Healey
Dear employee
Being a member of your funding organisation i.e. the tax paying public of Great Britain, I would like to take this opportunity to register my complaint, in line with The Guardian’s Free Our Data Campaign, in respect of The Ordnance Survey charging me for information which has already been paid for by many previous tax paying generations.
One of your sincere employers
Robert Foulds
101a Bawtry Road
Bramley
Rotherham
Yorkshire
S66 2TW
March 16th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
With respect to the INSPIRE proposal (if ever was a misnomer!- DESPAIR would have been better) perhaps what non-governmental geospatial information providers and services co’s should do is put down an amendment to the effect:
The data/information collected by governments across Europe is copyright of these governments organisations, but so as to remove the de facto unfair commercial advantage these organisations enjoy over the private sector, they may not redistribute information gathered under contract to governments, or funded by direct taxation.
This way copyright may not be used as a blunt instrument to prevent the free distribution of data and origination of data distributed is fully acknowledged.
March 16th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
Oops!
my above reply should read:
…”but so as to remove the de facto unfair commercial advantage these organisations enjoy over the private sector, they may not redistribute for financial gain, information gathered under contract to governments, or funded by direct taxation.”
March 19th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
I am very pleased to see this issue gaining the prominence it deserves. I have been runnning a blog about issues to do with the re-use of public sector information ( http://rpsi.blogspot.com ) for the last year and have presented papers at several conferences on it. I am sure this web site and blog wil generate a much needed debate.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:57 pm
An issue that has yet to be dicussed here and which has become a major problem in the USA wrt the free availability of geospatial digital data, is the file format the data is distributed in.
This has particulalry become a problem wrt to remote sensing (”satellite”) imagery.
In the US, Lizardtech persuaded many US Government agencies to disseminated their holdings of such imagery in MrSid form (.sid files). For those that dont know, MrSid technology uses wavelet-based image compression, to achieve high file compression, with negligible or minimal information loss, to allow easier distribution and archiving of what are commonly gigbyte sized image files, decompressed.
The problem with .sid , is that this file format is proprietry and required the user to purchase some very expensive decoding software from Lizardtech (or its successor) to decompress .sid files *not such a problem now). Thus, the flow of such information was for a time seriously impacted.
A similar example is the supply of geospatial vector drawing and attribute date in ESRI’s proprietry .e00 format.
If there is to be free availabaility of information, it must be supplied in public domain, non-copyrighted, unlicenced file formats.