Landon,
You can find a nice example of how agencies already provide
free access to publicly funded geospatial data
released in formats that are readable by OSGEO software stack at
http://www.nconemap.org/
You need to work with your state and local governments because they are
the ones who fund most of the mapping and who have the data (and/or
elect state
legislators who make it a law to provide the publicly funded data for
free).
I would guess that NC is not the only state in US that makes its data
available for free,
so there are probably more examples. Maybe those from other states
where this works
could share their experience.
Good place to meet people from federal, state and local governments
who deal
with geospatial data is the state GIS conference (if I remember
correctly you planned to attend
one in your state), see the latest in NC here:
http://www.cgia.state.nc.us/Default.aspx?alias=www.cgia.state.nc.us/
ncgis2007
NCGIS regularly includes session on open source software as well as
data accessibility
(this year it was "Low cost / High value web mapping" which was
packed, for data it was
"Data sharing, access and distribution" and many others) so people
from agencies
are kept up to date on open source software developments thanks to
several great
open source software and free data advocates that we have here,
Helena
Helena Mitasova
Dept. of Marine, Earth and Atm. Sciences
1125 Jordan Hall, NCSU Box 8208,
Raleigh NC 27695
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/
On Nov 12, 2007, at 4:25 PM, Landon Blake wrote:
Is there any effort at the OSGeo to advocate for “reasonable”
access to publicly funded geospatial data? By reasonable I mean:
[1] With an affordable price reflecting the actual cost to
reproduce the data.
[2] Released in a format that doesn’t require expensive proprietary
software.
For example, the United States Forest Service has some extensive
geospatial data sets available to the public, but they release it
in ESRI Geodatabase Format. (They didn’t respond to my requests for
the data in Shapefile Format.) Another example is one of my local
counties, which sells data in ESRI Shapefile format for $200 a
layer under a very strict license agreement.
I was wondering if there was any type of “committee” or other
organized effort at the OSGeo that provided “education” and
advocacy for reasonable access to publicly funded data. It seems
like a natural fit for the organization, and one great way to
enable everyday use of open source GIS programs. (At a minimum, it
seems like we could keep a catalog of public agencies and there
policy for the release of geospatial data.)
Landon
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