Steve McArthur wrote:
Hope this is not too off topic, but a collegue just pointed me to an
interesting article regarding the supply of geographic data in the UK
and Europe.There is some interesting comparisons to what is done over in
the US. I'd be interested in what others on the list think.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1726229,00.html
Spot on... It's no accident that US companies dominate the GIS business,
and when I heard a few years ago that Canadian government data sources
were so expensive that few people purchased them, resulting in lower
revenue streams, which resulted in smaller maintenance efforts, which
further increased the cost and diminished the usefulness of the data,
ultimately resulting in American companies selling Canadians street data
for Canada, you have to wonder about the wisdom of crown copyright.
Especially embarrassing for Canada because they *invented* GIS.
But despite the obvious evidence of the benefits of providing
government-developed GIS data copyright-free here in the United States,
we still have many state, county and city governments who think they're
in the data business and who charge far too much for public data. Worse,
they seldom bother to coordinate their efforts so that even if you
purchase data from them and their neighbors, you still have to spend
hours conflating the data before it's useful. If they were a private
business and did that, they be on the ash-heap of history faster than
you can say "government monopoly."
In the US, only the Federal government is required to offer data they've
gathered to the public either free or for no more than cost of
distribution; local governments can do as they please. For sure, many
local governments here realize that government should not be run as a
business, but there are still far too many who use public taxes to fund
their little GIS businesses. If you argue that small agencies need to
recover costs to maintain their expensive staff, computers and plotters
and multi-thousand dollar ESRI licenses, then I'd say maybe they could
save money by eliminating those expenses and farming out some or all of
their GIS needs to private business (where hopefully there would be some
competition.)
- Bill Thoen
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