How the Danes get it right with address data
In today’s Guardian, Mike Cross writes about how Denmark has shown that pooling public data can be done – easily:
The server’s owner, the National Agency for Enterprise and Construction, also licenses bulk data to commercial re-users, such as estate agents and finance businesses.
About 15 commercial users pay an annual subscription of about £5,000 and then about 10p per megabyte, which the government says is the marginal cost of connecting them and supplying data.
Before 2003, commercial users had to request individual property details, at a fee of about 50p each. Under the new arrangements, demand for data has soared, says Ulrik Roehl of the agency.
“When we started, we thought there might be around 10 distributors, but we exceeded that in two years,” he says. The distributors download about 65m property details a month.
Reducing charges encourages takeup? Simple supply and demand, of course. And within government, there are no charges.
We’re looking for more foreign examples so we can begin to make the point to government. Anyone else pitch in on how other countries do it?
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- Paying twice for data? Through your council, you might be paying EIGHT times (21 March 2006; score: 18.31%)
- Free our address data - or at least get them to stop charging each other: the petition (13 March 2007; score: 17.71%)
- Want the Postcode Address File for free? Just ask (updated) (21 July 2008; score: 17.11%)
- In today's Guardian: who will address the postcode mess? (13 July 2006; score: 16.46%)
- Will the Post Office and Ordnance Survey ever agree about house names? (10 July 2006; score: 15.78%)
December 2nd, 2006 at 3:10 pm
There was an error in the previous submission, I’ll try again..
LENDING SERVICE – A FINNISH INNOVATION TO IMPROVE ACCESS TO SPATIAL DATA RESOURCES
Tuuli Toivonen, Risto Kalliola & Eeva Ennola
University of Turku, Finland
In Finland, a new type of download service for spatial data has been developed and it has proved to at least partly ease the problems of poor data accessibility and high pricing.
Operational since the year 2003, the Spatial Data Lending Service (Paikkatietolainaamo) delivers spatial data sets in their native GI format, free of charge. The downloaded data sets may be used for one year for testing, research, education and product development. The service idea has been acknowledged in the National Geographic Information Strategy (2004) and it forms part of the Finnish spatial data infrastructure.
The secretariat of the service takes care of delivery mechanisms, and any data providers and users are welcome to use the service. The web service (www.paikkatietolainaamo.fi), which operates currently only in Finnish, includes a metadata search, a map viewer and a download tool, the use of which requires registration.
Information on each download is stored in an database and data providers may follow from the statistics which of their data sets are being downloaded and by whom.
Information of each download is stored in a database and data providers may follow from graphs and statistics the downloads and downloaders of their data sets. The participation in the service gives the data providers an extra channel for making their spatial data known, and it provides feedback on the applicability of their data. Under these conditions, it has not been difficult to attract data producers to participate.
The current data providers include all major national data providers in Finland (National Land Survey, Finnish Environment Institute, Geological Survey of Finland, Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finnish Road Administration, Finnish Maritime Administration, some Regional Councils and cities) but also private enterprises (AffectoGenimap and Experian).
There are currently some 700 registered users representing public sector (56%), private companies (20%) or regular citizens (24%). The largest representation is from research and education sector. This year, until 1st Dec, the service has been visited by around 4000 users. Many of the users make just some downloads or rather just view the data – a good example that even free of change data is not over-harvested.
Originally, the data was available from limited test region in Finland (200 x 200 km and some smaller windows for large scale data). Currently, an increasing number of data producers is interested in giving out the data from the entire country, as the service is seen as an easy solution for data deliveries.
The implementation of the spatial data lending facility has been supported by EU’s Life Environment funds and it has proven to be an efficient way to make extensive spatial data resources available for a large number of users. The limited test area, limited use time and possibility to gain information on the potential data users has attracted even commercial data providers to deliver their data free of charge.
Lending service is one step towards free sharing of data. As INSPIRE directive talks mostly about users in the administration, the lending is free for everyone. Therefore, the lending model could be integrated even in the future download services as defined in the INSPIRE directive.