I have only just come across last January's discussion on this list of the
British county boundary polygons created by my project, available here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02681.html
I am rather baffled why nobody tried contacting my project rather than
speculating on what we might agree to and why! The central problem is not
copyright rules imposed by somebody else but our limited capacity to develop
software.
<> You need to distinguish our web site, A Vision of Britain through Time
(http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk) and the underlying GB Historical GIS
(http://www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis). Vision of Britain was never meant to
be the ultimate and only interface to the GB Historical GIS, and it was
certainly not the first -- but it is the only one I got to design.
<> Vision of Britain was funded by the UK National Lottery as a web site for a
very big audience of people interested mainly in LOCAL history. It does this
job very well, and is very popular, but this means it is very different from a
standard GIS-driven web site: the main aim is to tell you as much as possible
as quickly as possible about individual towns and villages, and one implication
is that we aimed for the best possible on-screen experience -- it is not and
never will be a download site.
<> Vision of Britain went live in 2004, six years after our digital boundary
data were made available on-line for download via EDINA's UKBORDERS web site.
The problem with UKBORDERS is that its development was funded ENTIRELY by the
ESRC Census Programme to disseminate modern boundary data covered by very
restrictive Ordnance Survey copyright agreements, and its running costs are met
the same way. Our agreement with EDINA is very informal, with no money
changing hands in either direction, and no new money from anywhere to run a
"historical boundary mapping facility" -- so there was no funding at all to add
features to the UKBORDERS software. The automated UKBORDERS system is
consequently completely unable to distinguish between our content and the
Ordnance Survey data, and the current access rules are determined by the
Ordnance Survey even though they hold no copyright in our pre-1957 data at all.
<> We could obviously set up some page within Vision of Britain from which
boundary data stored as shape files were very simply downloadable, but I am
afraid we cannot do this. Significant parts of the boundary data do not belong
to us, but just as importantly money we have made licensing our boundary data
for commercial use is currently absolutely crucial to keeping Vision of Britain
running. NB both UKBORDERS and Vision of Britain are hosted by EDINA, but in
other ways they are quite different: UKBORDERS was developed by EDINA with
development and running costs funded by the ESRC; Vision of Britain was
developed by a university consortium of Queens Belfast, Leeds and Portsmouth,
led by myself; VoB running costs for 2001-4, a contractual period required by
the national lottery, were paid by the British Library but thereafter it is
basically down to money I manage to raise.
<> In an ideal world, the ESRC or JISC would fund EDINA to add features to
UKBORDERS allowing it to separate Ordnance Survey content from data generated
within the HE sector, and further fund them to run a less restrictive service
covering the latter -- but still limiting access so that commercial users could
not get the stuff for free, and recording downloads so we could deal with
misuse.
<> We currently have new funding from JISC to enhance Vision of Britain. The
new site we launch next spring will offer much enhanced on-screen access to our
mapping, via OpenLayers, but I am afraid still no boundary download facility.
If the latter ever gets added, it will not be via a UKBORDERS clone but via an
OGC Web Feature Server -- but we will still need some security because income
from commercial licensing of the boundary data is not just a "potential income
stream", it is currently the main reason the Vision of Britain site still
exists, and seems likely to remain so.
Humphrey Southall
(Director, GB Historical GIS)
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