Daily newspaper The Guardian is still pursuing its worthy campaign Free our Data, which highlights how much information the government creates and then either never makes available to information professionals and consumers or does so at restrictively high prices.
Today's issue of the newspaper rather timely reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency. It did this as large parts of Yorkshire look more like Bangladesh as climate change wrought terrible rain and flooding on the region.
OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest.
Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infringement of "database copyright".
Guardian journalist Charles Arthur describes the need for this service and its use public information as an opportunity to save public money as there is a reduced need to use emergency services if houses in high flood risk areas are, effectively abandoned, especially when this information has been left out of the new Home Information Packs.
It’s a compelling story and The Guardian should be saluted for continuing this campaign, read the full story here:
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