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On the 17th November 2009 great strides were made towards the delivery of map based solutions to the general public.
In the UK we are in a bit of a weird situation that to access geo-spatial datasets for use on the internet (for example in our webSNAPS product) for things like postcode or ward boundaries has attracted a charge from the data owner.
You may think that this sounds fine and dandy. Why wouldn’t you pay for this kind of data? Or rather you would think that right up to the point where you realise where some of this data has come from.
An example of this are ward boundaries which are collected by local councils, who are funded by us, the taxpayer. We’ve found this particularly odd when dealing with the local councils who then have to fork out money to display this information back onto their website, money which comes again from the taxpayer. So they are in effect paying twice to be able to give the data back to the people who paid for it in the first place!
But this is now set to change: Ordnance Survey Announcement
Hopefully this may also pave the way for Royal Mail to consider releasing postcodes for free, at least to public service or not-for-profit type ventures, and stop threatening people who are providing this kind of service like the people over at http://ernestmarples.com. There is a petition currently doing the rounds for this at: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nfppostcodes/ – sign it if you can…
Here’s hoping!
