The public will miss out on the opportunity to view an online 3D map of London, and a potential wealth of relational data, following a decision by the Ordnance Survey (OS) to withhold licenses for its information.
The Virtual London project was meant to act as a useful visualisation tool; it included three million of the capital’s buildings.
The idea was that London’s citizens would gain a better appreciation of new developments and environmental concerns if they could visualise the impact on their local boroughs.
This could be through seeing the implications of land development in their borough or mashing-up environmental impact data, such as areas with high levels of air pollution or sections of the capital prone to flooding. As London’s councils are exempt from such licensing restrictions, Haringey Council have used it effectively to show heat loss from each building in their borough.
After six years of development, negotiations broke down last week over licensing terms and costs between the OS and the developers of Virtual London; UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) and Google who were to use the data on their Google Earth platform. The OS, which owns the crown copyright of Virtual London’s spatial data, sells licenses to access the information; it wanted Google to pay on a per-user basis, Google however wanted to make a one-off payment. In response to the OS decision, Google is said to have released the one word statement, “disappointed.”
As today’s Technology Guardian points out, the strange thing is that the office of the mayor of London funded the initiative in order to engage the public in their city in more substantial ways, informing them with a unique and effective tool.
The question everyone is asking is why can’t the public access information that they have already paid for and help fund the development of?
The OS say that they were unable to issue the licences for the project the way Google wanted because it wouldn’t fit into their current framework.
The authors of the Digital Urban blog who are involved with the project explain the justification the OS gave to them. The OS said “There is an existing licensing model that works for the original purpose of Virtual London i.e. the availability to London boroughs etc. What Google wanted to do would take it out of those licensing arrangements”
But expecting Google to pay on a per user basis at best doesn’t seem realistic or considered, at worst protectionist and out of touch. The OS approach is distinctly unsuited to the digital age, what is required now is quick and easy access to data and the ability to apply that information in new and interesting ways. The current system doesn’t seem to have caught on to that idea yet.
Perhaps Google's one-off fee offer isn’t realistic either; a yearly subscription is perhaps a solution? However it is the rigidity of the OS position and its business model that reveals something probably needs to change there first of all.
Earlier this month, the Technology Guardian’s Free Our Data blog, ran another article that showed how government departments such as the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had complained to the Communities and Local Government select committee, saying that the OS licensing rules were restricting Defra in the supplying of information to other European governments and partner organisations.
The MoD had the following to say “in recent times the boundaries applied to the use of OS’s data for public service and national interest work have become increasingly blurred. MoD has experienced more stringency and complexity being applied to the release of data by OS, which has resulted in uncertainty and lack of flexibility in the use of that data by the MoD.”
If the OS are drawing this kind of considered criticism from fellow government departments’ a review of its commercial operation is perhaps long overdue?
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