The Ordnance Survey (OS) has accussed the Met of breaking the (legally binding) terms of use for its data when the Met started producing maps showing crime levels across London.
At the heart of the dispute is the problem that although the OS is a public body, it is also expected to hit profit targets each year, and therefore treats letting others – including other public bodies – use its data as a commercial transaction. This means that many possible interesting developments matching up data or pointing people at data are hindered, or never happen, because of the costs involved.
In this case, it is the Met that is being accused of falling foul of the rules, but what makes this particular incident promising is that crime maps have been promised by both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. The Met-OS stand off may well therefore finally force a solution to this long running problem which has been bubbling along for several years without the sort of senior ministerial intervention that could cut through it. It would be far more than just the Met’s crime maps that would benefit if that happens.
The Guardian’s Free Our Data blog has more on this stand-off.
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3 Comments
Mark
This gives only half the story. What the Met Police are doing is falling foul of the google Terms and conditions which can be interpretted in simple terms as saying “anything you place on google maps you will allow us to commercially exploit for our benefit with now recompense to you and you give us the rights to do so and are entitled to give those rights to us”
This falls foul of the agreement between OS and goverment and is very much a thin end of the wedge scenario.
At present OS is revenue positive to the treasury all be it with income from governemnt departments. Given the current climate are we really saying we want to transfer all their revenue otential free of charge to google by allowing them to aggregate all the OS datasets via this method with no plans for update
I rather hope the party I am an active member of is not considering that route given how much of government integration is based around the common quality standards that the OS model currently delivers
Pete: I think the situation is rather more complicated than that, because Google have said this isn’t what they want to do. I agree though that there are lots of issues around possible solutions, though that’s why a high profile case like this may turn out to be useful as it could force some decisions.
Overall on the OS and its role, the common standards deliver many benefits, but the pricing / licensing model also holds back numerous projects and ideas.
Mark,
When the maps T+Cs were revised last week Google added a new element making it explicit via an example that they would use position locations of anything that could enhance their local search capacity to maximise its accuracy.
This is exactly what OS fear and was sufficient to see several voluteer sites such as Geograph suspend their google services until the matter was clarified.