fe4d7be0_nance_Survey_official_response__The_Ordnance_Survey_replies___
[The Guardian says...] This situation prevails across a number of government agencies. Its effects are all bad. It stifles innovation, enterprise and the creativity that should be the lifeblood of new business. And that is why Guardian Technology today launches a campaign — Free Our Data. The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies.
We have more than 500 commercial partners, many of whom have joined our partner programme in the past five years. There is no such thing as free data. Someone has to pay for it. Collecting, maintaining and distributing data cost Ordnance Survey 105.7m in 2004-05. It is very unlikely that the Treasury would bear the cost of this. There is no political will from any of the mainstream political parties to return to funding national geographic data collection and maintenance from the Exchequer. History shows that data quality suffers for lack of investment. The rise in popularity of Ordnance Survey maps in the inter-war period masked severe reductions in staff numbers and widened the time-lag between revisions of essential large-scale mapping. It took many years to rectify this and bring the mapping back up to date. In recent years we have been able to deliver extensive investment to ensure that data quality is maintained along with many other innovations based directly on customer need.
Free Our Data: Articles: the Ordnance Survey official response
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