Here’s James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:
“Some of Britain’s most impressive internet policy experts had long been trying to break down this particular door. Ex-MP Richard Allan. Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson. Internet gurus Tom Steinberg, and Tom Loosemore. Former Number 10 policy advisor William Perrin. All bounced back dazed when they tried shoulder charging the Ordnance Survey’s door, as if tripped up by a canny geographer’s sandal on their run up. So my colleague Tom Chatfield and I decided we that needed to find out exactly how the man who invented the web had managed to reinvent the rules of British data.”
Via Tom Watson MP.
There’s still too much spin around this topic, perhaps unsurprisingly! Nobody has broken down the doors at the OS yet, it’s out for consultation and any thing might happen and some of the solutions might actually make life worse in some way. The fact that the OS is a national institution means that the data collection is national and up-to-date, if privatized sparse rural areas, the type people like to go on holiday and go walking in would end up with out-of-date mapping, for a start!
As to the datasets, although Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt appeared at a joint Chief Information Officer (local and National) in June 2009, there has been no attempt to consider ways of releasing local datasets until now. If the 353 councils in the UK are to release datasets, that needs to be done in an organized manner so that we get it UK wide and to the same standard.
It took years (and shed-loads of money and effort) to bring about the National Land & Property
Gazetteer and this is without bottoming out issues with the Postcode File.
OK, starts been made, but lets not get overexcited – the data is only useful if its useful and maintained…
Mick http://greatemacipator.com