Ordnance Survey maps to go free online
That’s the word from The Guardian, backers of the three year old Free Our Data campaign. Not that they didn’t have help from outspoken proponents of making the Ordnance Survey data free(r) to use. Exactly how it will be done is not clear. What we do know:
In the new year Brown intends to publish 2,000 sets of data, possibly including all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences.
It is thought transport providers, such as train, tube and bus companies, will lose the right to demand a hefty fee from companies such as independent travel websites and firms devising programs for mobile phones, who want to publish such information….
The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high.
A team at Cambridge University, commissioned by the Treasury ran the numbers regarding moving to free; it found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m.
