A good idea, in principle.
Small point of order though: I was of the understanding that OGL is not quite compatible
with CC-BY - AFAIK, it's something to do with database rights. I'm not an expert
on this, though, and am happy to be corrected.
Richard Symonds
On 6 Oct 2011, at 15:16, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
Hi all,
The government have a consultation going on at the moment about the
future of the Public Data Corporation. The PDC is responsible for
commercially valuable public data including Ordnance Survey, Land
Registry and Met Office data. While the government is releasing a lot
of data under the Open Government License (which is compatible with
Wikimedia's content as it basically boils down to government-branded
CC BY). In fact, we have added OGL photos to Commons and some of them
are now in use on enwiki.
But the data controlled by the PDC could potentially be of use to
Wikimedians: the Ordnance Survey and Met Office data could be used to
produce better, more detailed maps of Britain and those images can be
reused by projects like Wikipedia (to illustrate place names),
Wikinews (for original research stories), Commons,
Wikibooks/Wikiversity (for geography textbooks/tutorials etc.).
Being able to merge government-produced data that we have funded the
creation of (through taxation) with volunteer produced content
(through Wikimedia, Open Street Map, free and open source software)
could dramatically help our mission of supporting the spread of free
and open knowledge. The Dutch government recently agreed to release a
lot of their geographical information for free, and it'd be great if
the UK could too.
Is there any interest in putting together a response to the
government's consultation on the Public Data Corporation basically
saying we're firmly in favour of the government releasing as much as
they possibly can under free licenses. We could do this either as
Wikimedia UK or, if that isn't kosher with the charity application, as
"Wikimedians in the UK" or something. ;-)
Yours,
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
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