Wednesday, February 11. 2009

Update: Lessons from Mapping the Australian Fires

Update 2/11/09: ZDnet Australia explains the challenges faced in putting the map (and some others) together due to Crown Copyright of government data.

The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands — which are managed by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) — produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot that data on the map as well.

The culprit, according to [Google Australia engineering director Alan] Noble: legally established Crown copyright provisions, which assign copyright over all government-produced information to the government and prevent its use without explicit consent. Crown copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US, where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public domain.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Standards at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Read more about the Australian Bushfires Appeal and how the British Red Cross is helping the victims on www.redcross.org.uk/bushfireinfo

#1 Stela Yordanova on 2009-02-16 06:01 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Stela Yordanova on 2009-02-16 06:01
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry