How much does it cost to display a map online? The correct(ed) answer
After last week’s blog post in which we suggested it would cost millions to put an OS map of the UK online if you had a successful site (with, say, 2,000 users per day), we’ve had lots of people saying that’s wrong. And it is.
So today’s Guardian carries the story How much does it cost to display an OS map on a website?:
Much less than we estimated last week. In “Time to account for travel maps’ costs” (June 22), we wrote: “For a charity to put [those maps] on a webserver that might be used by hundreds of people (a typical server can handle 2,000) would cost millions of pounds annually.”
In fact, Ordnance Survey points out, the cost would be more like £18,000 per year – a hundredfold less than we suggested.
Of course we should have checked and checked again. Yup. We were following mySociety’s expectation that if it cost £1,000 for a single user internally per year, that that would scale up scarily once you displayed the data online.
But the confusion is understandable. OS’s page on copyright licensing for internet use (at http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/copyright/purpose/internet.html) does not specify that internet users en masse only count as one; hence mySociety’s expectation that internet use would lead to an explosion in costs.
Not so, said OS. For a single scale mapping of the country – say, at 1:50,000 scale – including Code Point for finding postcodes (so you can get a map of a postcode’s location), the annual licence for a website serving 20,000 map images per day, every day, would be £18,200 per year.
To provide the mapping service most web users are used to, one would have to license several scales: we have grown used to being able to zoom in on a point.
Streetmap offers seven mapping scales; Multimap offers 13, though not all appear to come from OS. Using multiple scales will, of course, ramp up costs very quickly – as will being popular. But even licensing seven scales will only take your annual costs to around £100,000 – not into the millions. Unless, of course, you are wildly successful.
So, that’s corrected, we hope. But even so:
Tom Steinberg, mySociety’s director, says: “The price for these maps, which cover only a small chunk of the country, is way above affordability by most small and medium-sized enterprises, a group that employs more than half the UK workforce. Furthermore, it excludes the entire caste of internet-based enthusiasts who’ve produced about 80% of all the innovative mapping work in the world over the past couple of years.”
Even at the new lower price, we probably won’t be putting those maps on soon..
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June 29th, 2006 at 10:18 am
Tom Steinberg says “… the entire caste of internet-based enthusiasts who’ve produced about 80% of all the innovative mapping work in the world over the past couple of years”
Is this statement based on research or is it an assertion?
June 29th, 2006 at 10:21 am
With a little effort you could probably use one of the free API’s (Google et al) which provide adequate levels of data to drape behind the travel to work zones without having to set up a map server etc.
June 29th, 2006 at 11:10 am
No Steven, I didn’t do any formal research, except on the proprtion of the labour market employed by SMEs. I was just citing my own belief based on a reasonably close observation of the GIS world. Obviously innovation can’t be measured in quantities which can be divided in %s, and different ways of looking at the problem would produce very different answers (ie if you measured innovation by invested capital, as opposed to unique services, for example). I should probably have said “much of the innovation”.
June 29th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
I work for an archaeological unit. There’s no way we can afford the kind of prices that the Ordnance Survey charges to license data. We work all over the country and use maps every day, yet if we want digital coverage we’d have to lay staff off to pay for it. As for displaying our data online, we don’t want to make a profit from this, we just want to show our own staff and possibly the public where in the country we’ve worked. We don’t want to use the Google interface because there are better (fully open source) ones out there with more functionality.
June 29th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Tom
I would have thought that the biggest catalist for innovation in GI over the last year has been the advent of Google and Yahoo free APIs that incorporate most of the data that people require for visualisation. An enormous amount of creativity has been harnessed through mash-ups (developed by “enthusiasts”) but the credit must go the professionals working at Yahoo and Google who have created these possibilities and have also licensed the street level and photographic data that supports their services from commercial providers.
In many regards those APIs provide an answer to the free data access problem although as Jo points out above the APIs will not provide the range of functionality that some projects require. Still they are a good point to get started.
June 29th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Just out of interest Steven, do you believe that the OS licencing regime should be reformed at all? If so, in what ways?
June 29th, 2006 at 8:09 pm
Tom
There is definitely rooom for improvement – a lot of room! Some areas for consideration:
* Simplify terms and conditions – much of the confusion over the recent Guardian article is down to the lack of simple english licensing info (that does not excuse the author substituting millions of pounds for thousands!)
* Work out some very low cost licensing for some of the products (not the very high resolution/crown jewels) for the not for profit sector. Problem may be defining the scope of this sector.
* Move towards a pay per click model for the commercial sector that would support new businesses getting started but scaled for large users.
* Create a low level product for web and desktop use that could be made available for free (perhaps revive one of the old products) with a limited update programme.
* Sort out the Royal Mail IPR in the postal address File. Several of the issues discussed in this blog relate to Royal Mail’s conditions not OS
There is my starting list. No doubt others can add more ideas.
What i do beleive is important is that we consider the licensing model within the context of the framework set for OS by government – the Trading Fund. if OS were centrally funded and made their data available to all for free they would be vulnerable to the vagaries of the budget process and if funds were cut we could find that data quality and currency would suffer. I have seen the consequences of not having an efficient national mapping agency in the US and it is not great. there are many important public services that depend on the quality of the OS detailed products – let’s facilitate extending the other uses of their data without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
[...] A thought provoking post by Steven on the Free Our Data blog, I’m sure many we share his opinions, but they are more difficult to implement than one might imagine , but we are trying ! [...]
July 3rd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
and that’s just the data cost, Ordnance Survey only provide the raw data (at huge cost), then there is conversion and restructuring the data for use in GIS, Mapping Applications etc.
from experience, codepoint/address point, delivered in csv format need to be merged changed to six figure references (dividing by 10). Then there is the Northern Ireland data (BT codes) needing to be re-projected in to British National Grid as it is in Irish National Grid.
Then the Postcodes in the North Sea need adjusting as they are 100,000 meters out, some temp at OS adding in zero’s?
And then they expect us to do this every 6 month update…
Where do we do send the invoices to Ordnance Survey for our time and effort to clean their mistakes?
The Monopoly rules on, can’t even provide a geocoding service for google maps api as the red tape between Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey gets tangled within itself.
Reduce Costs and get more users!
USA government data is Free – as is paid for by the taxes.
UK users just have to pay for it twice.
July 5th, 2006 at 11:14 am
It’s worth pointing out that OS’s Get-a-map service provides free mapping and gives clearly stated permission to place them on a non-commercial website as well as in print (http://getamap.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/). These are static images rather than raw data or a dynamic API but are nonetheless perfectly suitable for, say, directing someone to my house.
Aled.