As the founding outreach director for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and now as senior staff writer for the OGC, I have been promoting the OGC consensus process and consensus-derived geoprocessing interoperability standards for sixteen years.

From the time I first learned about geographic information systems in the mid-1980’s, I have been fascinated by the vision of an ever-deepening accumulation of onion-like spatial data layers covering the Earth.

For those unfamiliar with geographic information systems (GIS): a “spatial data layer” is a digital map that can be processed with other maps of the same geographic area. With an elevation map and a road map, for example, you can derive a road slope map. Today, geospatial information has escaped the confines of the GIS to become a ubiquitous element of the world’s information infrastructure. This is largely a result of standards: Communication means transmitting or exchanging through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior. Standardization means agreeing on a common system. OGC runs an open standardization process, and OGC standards enable communication between GISs, Earth imaging systems, navigation systems, map browsers, geolocated sensors, databases with address fields etc.

I was disappointed when I discovered that, in practice, despite extraordinary advances in technical capabilities for data sharing, much of the geospatial data created by scientists, perhaps most of it (other than data from civil agencies’ satellite-borne imaging systems), never becomes available to their colleagues. This lack of open access to geospatial data seems to me to be more tragic than the lack of open access to other kinds of scientific data, not only because humanity faces critical environmental challenges, but also because all geospatial data refer to the same Earth, and thus every new data layer is rich with possibilities for exploration of relationships to other data layers. I am, therefore, very glad that the Panton Principles have been published and a geospatial open access working group has been established.

In preparation for eventually writing an article on the subject of open access to geospatial data, working with a few OGC member representatives (special thanks to Simon Cox of CSIRO) and OGC staff, I collected a list of 17 reasons why scientists’ geospatial data ought to be published online, with metadata registered in a catalog, using OGC interoperability standards. (The 17 reasons are appended to this blog entry.)

In January I put these reasons into slides that I used in a talk at the Marsh Institute at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. After briefly stating each reason, I explained how OGC standards and the progress of information technology make open access feasible. I provided evidence that the geosciences are rapidly moving in the direction of open access, and I offered ideas on how academics might contribute to and benefit from this progress.

I’m quite sure the Panton Principles are consistent with the goals of the geoscientists in the OGC. But I hasten to add that I am not speaking for them, and most of the 390+ OGC members are not geoscience organizations; most are technology providers, data providers and technology users with other roles in the geospatial technology ecosystem. But this diversity makes the OGC, I think, a particularly valuable “idea space” for academics who have an interest in open access to geospatial data and services. (Services are the future. A land use change model, for example, is a service when it is made available online “in the cloud” for others to use without downloading.)

One domain in the OGC that has value for open science is the work of the OGC Geo Rights Management Working Group (GeoRM WG). The Panton Principles discourage the use of licenses that limit commercial re-use or limit the production of derivative works, because the authors recognize the value of integrating and re-purposing datasets and enabling commercial activities that could be used to support data preservation. That’s important with respect to geospatial data, both because they are so often integrated and repurposed and because geospatial data sets are often complex and voluminous and thus potentially more expensive to curate than other kinds of data. The GeoRM WG has written a remarkable document, the GeoDRM Reference Model for use in developing standards for management of digital rights in the complex area of geospatial data and services. I think this will be a key resource as open access to geospatial data unfolds. The GeoDRM Reference Model provides a technical foundation necessary for implementing the Panton Principles.

Another valuable domain within the larger OGC idea space is the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) activity. Most geospatial data are collected by means of sensors, and thus it is important in the geosciences to have rigorous standard ways to describe sensors and sensor data in human-readable and machine-readable form. It is also important to have standard ways to schedule sensor tasks and aggregate sensor readings into data layers. Use of SWE standards is becoming important in some scientific areas such as ocean observation, hydrology and meteorology.

Both Web-resident sensors and data collections can be published and discovered by means of catalogs that implement the OGC Catalog Services - Web Interface Standard. This standard will likely become an integral infrastructure element for open access to geospatial data. It is designed to work with the ISO geospatial metadata standards, but those who begin implementing in this area discover that some work remains to make those standards more generally useful.

There are, in fact, many technical and institutional obstacles to overcome before science becomes as empowered by information technology as other estates such as business and entertainment. Technical interoperability obstacles are being overcome in the OGC by groups working in technology domains such as geosemantics, workflow, grid computing, data quality and oblique imagery; and in application domains such as hydrology, meteorology and Earth system science. Overcoming technical obstacles often precedes the obsolescence of institutional policies that stand as obstacles to progress.

I recently read Richard Ogle’s “Smart World,” a book about the new science of networks. In network terms, the OGC is a “hub” in an “open dynamic network”. What were once weak links between the OGC and other hubs such as the World Meteorological Organization and the International Environmental Modeling & Software Society (iEMSs) have been strengthened, and these stronger links make both the OGC and its partner hubs more likely to form new connections with other hubs. Hubs that directly contribute to digital connectivity, as the OGC does, have a special “pizzazz,” I would say. (I haven’t yet mastered the network science vocabulary). It seems to me the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Science Commons are hubs or idea spaces with a bright future of rich connections, and I look forward to seeing what connections they form with the OGC.

17 Reasons why scientific geospatial data should be published online using OGC standard interfaces and ISO standard metadata

Reason 1: Data transparency

Science demands transparency regarding data collection methods, data semantics, and processing methods. Rigor, documented!

Reason 2: Verifiability

Science demands verifiability. Any competent person should be able to examine a researcher’s data to see if those data support the researcher’s conclusions.

Reason 3: Useful unification of observations

Being able to characterize, in a standardized human-readable and machine-readable way, the parameters of sensors, sensor systems and sensor-integrated processing chains (including human interventions) enables useful unification of many kinds of observations, including those that yield a term rather than a number.

(From Simon Cox, JRC Europe and CSIRO Australia, editor of ISO 19156 (Observations and Measurements), coordinator of One-Geology geoinformatics, a designer of GeoSciML, and chair of the OGC Naming Authority.)

Reason 4: Data Sharing & Cross-Disciplinary Studies

Diverse data sets with well documented data models can be shared among diverse information communities*. Cross-disciplinary data sharing provides improved opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies.

OGC defines an information community as a group of people (such as a discipline or profession) who share a common geospatial feature data dictionary, including definitions of feature relationships, and a common metadata schema.

Reason 5: Longitudinal studies

Archiving, publishing and preserving well-documented data yields improved opportunities for longitudinal studies. As data formats, data structures, and data models evolve, scientists will need to access historical data and understand the assumptions so that meaningful scientific comparisons can be conducted. Community standards will help ensure long-term consistency of data representation.

Reason 6: Re-use

Open data enables scientists to re-use or repurpose data for new investigations, reducing redundant data collection and enabling more science to be done.

Reason 7: Planning

Open data policies enable collaborative planning of data collection and publishing efforts to serve multiple defined and yet-to-be-defined uses.

Reason 8: Return on investment

With open data policies, institutions and society overall will see greater return on their investment in research.

Reason 9: Due diligence

Open data policies will help research funding institutions perform due diligence and policy development.

Reason 10: Maximizing value

The value of data increases with the number of potential users*. This benefits science in a general way. It also creates opportunities for businesses that will collect, curate (document, archive, host, catalog, publish), and add value to data.

Similar to Metcalf’s law: “The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.”

Reason 11: Data Discoverability

Open data is discoverable data. Data are not efficiently discovered through literature searches. Searches of data registered using ISO-standard XML-encoded metadata can be efficient and fine-grained.

Reason 12: Data Exploration

Robust data descriptions and quick access to data will enable more frequent and rapid exploration of data – [“natural experiments”]((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment) – to explore hypothetical spatial relationships and to discover unexpected spatial relationships.

Reason 13: Data Fusion

Open data improves the ability to “fuse” in-situ measurements with data from scanning sensors. This bridges the divide between communities using unmediated raw spatial-temporal data and communities using spatial-temporal data that is the result of a complex processing chain.

(From Simon Cox)

Reason 14: Service chaining

Open data (and open online processing services) will improve scientists’ ability to “chain” Web services for data reduction, analysis and modeling.

Reason 15: Pace of science

Open data enables an accelerated pace of scientific discovery, as automation and improved institutional arrangements give researchers more time for field work, study and communication.

“Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, one reason we need real-time science. … Governances must be able to see and act upon key intervention points.” Brian Walker, Program Director Resilience Alliance and a scientist with the CSIRO, Australia

Reason 16: Citizen science & PR

Open science will help Science win the hearts and minds of the non-scientific public, because it will make science more believable and it will help engage amateur scientists – citizen scientists – who contribute to science and help promote science. It will also increase the quality and quantity of amateur scientists’ contributions.

Reason 17: Forward compatibility

Open Science improves the ability to adopt and utilize new/better data storage, format, discovery, and transmission technologies as they become available.

(Offered to OGC’s David Arctur for this list on 6 January 2010 by Sharon LeDuc, Chief of Staff, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Asheville, North Carolina, USA.)

(Another reason – cross-checking for sensor accuracy — occurred to me while writing this post.)

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A new report released late last month charts the history of open government data in the UK and the US, and it’s a fascinating read. Written by OKF board member Becky Hogge for a consortium of grant-giving organisations including the Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Institute and DfID, the Open Data Study:

“…explores the feasibility of advocating for open government data catalogues in middle income and developing countries. Its aim is to identify the advocacy strategies used in the US and UK data.gov and data.gov.uk initiatives, with a view to building a set of criteria that predict the success of similar initiatives in other countries and provide a template strategy to opening government data.”

I was interviewed for the report, as were John Wonderlich from the Sunlight Foundation, Tom Steinberg from mySociety and Ory Okollah from Ushahidi. Other interviewees include experts like Ethan Zuckerman and Toby Mendel, and - of course - Sir Tim Berners Lee.

The report draws some new and surprising conclusions. As well as recognising the role of organisations like the OKF and mySociety in bringing about data.gov.uk, it emphasises how crucial engagement with civil servants was to the success of the open data project in the UK. It raises interesting questions about what motivates politicians to embrace open data strategies, and even posits that the long battle to open up geospatial data in the UK worked in a positive way: “the barrier [opening geospatial data] imposed in the UK may have served as a common call to action among both civil society and the middle layer government administrators, which in turn served to strengthen the crucial communication between these two groups in the trajectory towards data.gov.uk, and ultimately enrich the final proposition when compared to data.gov.”

The report contains mixed findings about the prospects of similar projects in developing and middle income countries, providing a useful and very detailed checklist for advocates working within those countries to consult, and pointing to the potential role of international donors in this context. In short, I’d recommend reading this report to anyone interested in open government data, or indeed, in advocacy generally. Because, as Becky notes in her blog post introducing the report:

“I’d be hard pressed to think of an idea that has permeated as quickly as open data has from the fringe to the centre.”

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The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms.

What follows is a shared response to some of the questions raised by the consultation on the future of the Ordnance Survey’s data licensing and pricing model. This was sent using Ernest Marples’ open UK Geographic Data Consultation response service. See also the Simply Understand digestable, short version of the consultation document. March 17th, this Wednesday is the closing day of the response period.

Geographic information is critical to making effective use of open government data. Everything happens somewhere; to find data, and analyse it, location is invaluable context.

The Making Public Data Public programme is part of a global trend among administrations to provide state-collected information to citizens, free of cost or constraints.

Within the UK, public authorities, universities and commercial entities have been unable to exchange Ordnance Survey supplied geographic information with one another, although they have all purchased a license to use the data. The restrictions on “derived works” produced using Ordnance Survey data have blocked innovation and collaboration among those who already have access. Whichever policy option is chosen, the restrictions on sharing derived works should be lifted.

Every resource found in the real world has a geographic context. Basic geographic data should be readily available in a machine-readable form suitable for sharing; existing data can be efficiently updated by a wide user base, and gaps in the geographic data can be quickly filled.

The OpenStreetmap project (OSM) recently signed up its 200,000th map editor for its free and open source collaborative mapping project. After a rapid response by contributors to the crisis in Haiti, OSM became the default map for fieldwork in disaster recovery. Providers of aerial imagery lifted restrictions on derived works (for example, tracing of shapes from aerial imagery), and this was key to enabling the rapid response.

As free and open source platforms for managing geographic data have matured, so the knowledge and competence needed to work with GI has grown, and this expertise is available in local authorities, public archives, and in libraries.

As it stands, local authorities must produce and maintain data, which is then integrated into a standard national map by Ordnance Survey. New technology implies a change in the role of a National Mapping Agency, but it is still needed as source of quality assurance for data produced by a federation of local authorities.

Basic geographic data collected by a National Mapping Agency should be available at marginal cost - i.e. at the cost of distribution, tending to zero where data is made available over the internet. This is the model recommended by the 2008 Treasury-sponsored study on Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds.

Government should commit to supporting the National Mapping Agency outright, as a public good. This commitment can be justified on economic grounds, due to the available evidence suggesting that the free publication of geographic information will produce a surplus of taxable economic activity, above and beyond the costs of collection and maintenance of that data.

Government should commit to supporting the cost of maintaining quality geodata centrally, rather than distributing the costs around public authorities’ budgets. New business activity enabled by open geodata will be taxable, at no net cost (and possibly even a net profit) to the government.

The analysis done during the Cambridge study on Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds suggested that for large-scale, high specification OS data products “a change from average cost to a marginal cost regime would increase welfare. Specifically, gross benefits would be around £168m a year while net costs to government would be around £12m. Overall this implies an overall net benefit to society of £156m.”

Another reference is the recent New Zealand government report on Spatial Information in the New Zealand Economy:

“In 2008, the use and re-use of spatial information is estimated to have added $1.2 billion in productivity-related benefits… equivalent to slightly more than 0.6 per cent of GDP or GNP in 2008.”

“Had key barriers been removed it is estimated that New Zealand could have benefited from an additional $481 million in productivity-related benefits in 2008, generating at least $100 million in government revenue.”

It is important to recognise that the benefits go far beyond the traditional suppliers and consumers of geographic information.The economic and social value implicit in geographic information are only beginning to be realised. The market benefits of unlocking raw Ordnance Survey data will quickly return to the government more than it invests in supporting the agency.

As the consultation document states: “At the heart of [Option 3] is a shift towards government paying more”. Taxpayer-funded institutions already contribute more than 46% of Ordnance Survey’s revenue. Public authorities are suffering budget cuts due to the UK’s public sector debt crisis, and simply cannot afford to pay more.

An “updater pays” model can be used to defray the cost of maintenance of free and open mapping data. For example, a construction firm would pay to re-survey changes to the built environment that their work has caused. This can be viewed as a stamp tax on updates to geographic information.

Provided that the underlying data is made freely available, the Ordnance Survey may also continue to fund its activities in part by charging more than the marginal cost of distribution for “value-added” products, such as finished maps in print and digital forms.

The consultation document names a list of Ordnance Survey data products; of these, CodePoint (or a similar dataset which contains a mapping of postal codes to coordinate locations) and BoundaryLine (administrative and political boundaries) have the highest priority for civic applications. Without these two products available for re-use without constraint, the aims of the Making Public Data Public programme simply cannot be realised.

The small and mid scale raster products (images of maps showing less detail) can be generated from data at the largest scale. But these kind of added-value data products are not critical to the aims of the Making Public Data Public project, in the way that administrative areas and postal code locations are critical.

The Ordnance Survey should publish the raw data immediately, using common standards-based Internet technologies. Services providing annotation, printing, and download of map images can remain paid-for commodities for those without access to GIS expertise to work with the data.

Data should be made available under an open license which ensures freedom to use, alter and redistribute the data. The license chosen should accord with the terms of the Open Knowledge Definition.

In short,

Option 1 (things stay the same) is a non-option, given that geographic information is so critical to unlocking public data.

Option 2, (all OS raw data available at marginal cost) is the preferable option.

Option 3 (staged release of less commercially valuable products) seems like an unhealthy compromise.

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http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/keynotes

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In particular mappers and developers are scouring satellite images to identify collapsed and damaged buildings/bridges, spontaneous refugee camps, landslides, blocked roads and other damaged infrastructure - to help NGOs and international organisations respond more effectively to the crisis.

They have issued a call for assistance:

On January 12 2010, a 7.0 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince. The OpenStreetMap community can help the response by tracing Yahoo imagery and other data sources, and collecting existing data sets below. If you have connections with expat Haitian communities, consider getting in touch to work with them to enter place names, etc.

On Wednesday Mikel Maron wrote to the OSM talk list asking for help. Yesterday several companies authorised the OSM community to use their images.

There have been specific requests for up to date mapping information from humanitarian organisations on the ground. For example, on Wednesday, Nicolas Chavent of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team wrote to the OSM talk list:

I am relaying a mapping requirement grounded in Haiti from GIS practitioners mapping there at the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA): “NEED to map any spontaneous camps appearing in the imagery with size in area”

Recently generated data from Open Street Map has been used in maps by ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action) and the World Food Programme.

Yesterday evening Mikel Maron reported there had been over 400 edits since the earthquake. At the time of writing it looks like this has now more than doubled to over 800 edits since 12th January.

The following two images - before and after the earthquake - give you an impression of how much the OSM community have been doing!

For more see:

• WikiProject_Haiti page on Open Street Map Wiki
• The developing world on OpenStreetMap - Armchair mapping possibilities

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Colleagues at EDINA pointed out that some of the coverage assumes that the open data will be the same as that contained in the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File - but this is uncertain.

Since 2000, UK postcode data has been managed by a consortium called “Gridlink” which comprises Ordnance Survey, Royal Mail, the Office of National Statistics and the General Register of Scotland.

Ordnance Survey collects the data from the other consortium members, and they all have the right to re-sell the collected data. We can see the contractual setup of the Gridlink consortium in this response to an FOI request regarding the National Statistics Postcode Directory.

In short; it’s complicated. So it’s strange but not surprising to be sent a link to a confused opinion piece in the Financial Times discussing the role of “the Royal Mail, whose intellectual property the postcode datasets are”.

There are many different “postcode datasets” produced and licensed by different members of the GridLink consortium.

ONS and Royal Mail both sell “data products” which add lots of contextual data to the basic elements - which are the fact that a postcode exists, and the fact that it exists at a location. PAF records all the delivery addresses which share each postcode. The NSPD is meant for demographic statistics - it includes references to codes for census areas, health authorities, local government, etc covering the location of the postcode.

The simplest bit of raw data is the association of the postcode with the national grid reference at 1 meter resolution. The rest is added value, created by looking at the spatial relationships with other data sets. Imagine pushing a pin through a loose stack of paper shapes, giving them a shake, and seeing which ones stay on the pin. Then note which shapes stayed on the pin, and arrange the notes in a table form with an entry per postcode.

If the promise of data.gov.uk is realised, then anyone should be able to derive datasets that look a lot like the NSPD (but not the PAF). Raw postcode data provided under an open license does not stop Royal Mail from creating their own added-value products.

Open access just to the mapping between postcode and location would re-enable the “civic mashup” services that were dependent on ernestmarples.com. It’s enough to answer questions like “Who are my local councillors?”, “Are we in this school’s catchment area?” and “What new development work is being planned within a mile of me?”. Open postcodes will be fundamental to unlocking data.gov.uk and turning it into knowledge.

The data resulting from the activity of Gridlink is owned by the Crown, and is Crown Copyright. Postcodes are facts, they can be observed and independently recorded. NPEMaps and Free the Postcode are, or were, two efforts to reconstruct the facts from open sources - from old maps, or from GPS coordinates, and peoples’ knowledge about their own postcode.

I could go on in more obsessive detail, but you probably get the point. I’m unnerved by the idea that emotive media coverage of the Royal Mail’s future, as well as OS’s, will colour the consultation on opening state-collected geographic information in the UK. I would like to see more facts set out straight.

Thankfully, one worrying mis-statement in the FT article as already been corrected - the consultation on how to provide open access to the Ordnance Survey’s data was released today as expected. It runs til March 10th, and the likely last possible date that the current government can act on this is April 22nd. More on this later.

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The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham will today announce that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from next year, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve transparency.

While in the past Ordnance Survey have made limited data available with restrictions on how it can be used (such as via the OpenSpace API)- it looks like the new material will be open as in the Open Knowledge Definition, meaning it can be used for any purpose, including commercial:

Data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries as well as postcode areas would be released for free re-use, including commercially. Mid-scale digital mapping information would also be released in the same way.

At the Open Knowledge Foundation, we believe there are a plethora of social and economic benefits to making data open. In a similar vein, the release says:

Making public data available also enables people to reuse it in different and more imaginative ways than may have originally been intended. Estimates suggest that this could generate as much as a billion pounds for the UK economy.

For example developers might use this information alongside other Government data about transport, health or education, for services that generate economic and social value.

Openness of data is as important for local government as it is for national government - making people more connected to their community and giving them the tools to demand action on issues that matter. Releasing council records in re-usable form could mean that citizens can find out everything from the council accounts to the number of streetlights and community wardens, to when the rubbish is collected and the hedges trimmed.

The news was also reported by the BBC and the Guardian:

• Ordnance Survey maps to go online (BBC)
• OS mapping data: a new landscape unfolds (Guardian)

The relevant Ordnance Survey data is set to be released in April 2010. Very exciting news!

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We would be grateful for help in circulating the call to relevant lists and communities! You can reuse or point to:

• This blog post
• Main CFP page
• Plain text announce (wrapped at 72 characters)
• Identi.ca post
• Twitter post

Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) 2010: Call for Proposals

• where: London, UK
• when: Saturday 24th April, 2010
• www: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/
• last year: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/2009/
• cfp: http://www.okfn.org/okcon/cfp/ (due: Jan 31st 2010)
• hashtag: #okcon

Introduction

OKCon, now in its fifth year, is the interdisciplinary conference that brings together individuals from across the open knowledge spectrum for a day of presentations and workshops.

Open knowledge promises significant social and economic benefits in a wide range of areas from governance to science, culture to technology. Opening up access to content and data can radically increase access and reuse, improving transparency, fostering innovation and increasing societal welfare.

This is a time of great change. In addition to high profile initiatives such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the Human Genome Project, there is enormous growth among open knowledge projects and communities at all levels. Moreover, in the last year, governments across the world have begun opening up huge amounts of their data.

And it doesn’t stop there. In academia, open access to both publications and data has been gathering momentum, and similar calls to open up learning materials have been heard in education. Furthermore this gathering flood of open data and content is the creator and driver of massive technological change. How can we make this data available, how can we connect it together, how can we use it collaborate and share our work?

Join us to discuss all of this and more!

Topics

We welcome proposals on any aspect of creating, publishing or reusing content or data that is open in accordance with opendefinition.org. Topics include but are not limited to:

Technology

• Semantic Web and Linked Data in relation to open knowledge
• Platforms, methods and tools for creating, sharing and curating open knowledge
• Light-weight, adaptive interaction models
• Open, decentralized social network applications
• Open geospatial data

Law, Society and Democracy

• Open Licensing, Legal Tools and the Public Domain
• Open government data and content (public sector information)
• Open knowledge and international development
• Opening up access to the law

Culture and Education

• Open educational tools and resources
• Business models for open content
• Incentive and rewards open-knowledge contributors
• Open textbooks
• Public domain digitisation initiatives

Science and Research

• Opening up scientific data
• Supporting scientific workflows with open knowledge models
• Open models for scientific innovation, funding and publication (’open-access’)
• Tools for analysing and visualizing open data
• Open knowledge in the humanities

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: January 31st 2010
• Notification of acceptance: March 1st
• Camera-ready papers due: March 31st
• OKCon: April 24th 2010

Submission Details

We are accepting three types of submissions:

1. Full papers of 5-10 pages describing novel strategies, tools, services or best-practices related to open knowledge,
2. Extended talk abstracts of 2-4 pages focusing on novel ideas, ongoing work and upcoming research challenges.
3. Proposals for short talks and demonstrations

OKCon will implement an open submission and reviewing process. To make a submission visit:

• http://www.okfn.org/okcon/submit

Depending on the assessment of the submissions by the programme committee and external reviewers, submissions will be accepted either as full, short or lightning/poster presentations.

Proceedings of OKCON will be published at CEUR-WS.org. If you want your submission to be included in the conference proceedings you have to prepare a manuscript of your submission according to the LNCS Style.

Programme Committee

• Sören Auer, AKSW/Universität Leipzig
• Christopher Corbin, UK Advisory Board on Public Sector Information (APPSI)
• Adnan Hadzi and Andrea Rota, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London
• Claudia Müller-Birn, Carnegie Mellon University
• Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
• Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation and Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons

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OpenFlights is a site for “flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing”.

We’re very pleased to hear they’ve just released their data under the Open Database License (ODbL):

One of OpenFlights‘ most popular features is our dynamic airport and airline route mapping, and today, we’re proud to release the underlying data in an easy-to-use form, up to date for October 2009. Behold 56749 routes between 3310 airports on 669 airlines spanning the globe.

The data can be downloaded from our Data page and is free to use under the Open Database License.

See also the OpenFlights package on CKAN:

• http://ckan.net/package/open-flights

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The UK’s Department for Transport (DfT) has recently released data from the National Public Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) database to be put on Open Street Map (OSM).

As it says on the NaPTAN website:

NaPTAN provides a unique identifier for every point of access to public transport in the UK, together with meaningful text descriptions of the stop point and its location.

The NaPTAN page on the Open Street Map wiki says the data contains:

[...] details of some 350,000 public transport access points in Great Britain including bus stops, railway stations, tram stops and ferry terminals. This data includes a name, geocode, official code and other information useful to the project. The data set includes both the physical points of access to transport (Platforms, bus stops, airport gateways, etc), the interchanges (Stations, Airports, Ports, Clusters, etc ) and the the entrances to the interchanges from the street or public thoroughfare [...]

While the main NaPTAN database has restrictions on commercial use (see the naptan package page on CKAN, added at our Workshop on Public Information last autumn), under a special arrangement with the DfT and Traveline, the Open Street Map Foundation has been given access to the database to import useful and relevant data to Open Street Map to be made open under the terms of their license, the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.

An email from Roger Slevin at the DfT earlier this year placates the concerns that Ordnance Survey may claim rights in the data:

I am conscious that some concern has been expressed about whether OS has any rights to the NaPTAN data (or NPTG) - and I can assure the OSM community that the Department for Transport has been assured by Ordnance Survey that they do not claim any rights over NaPTAN location data - and it is a matter of record that Department for Transport is the owner of the NPTG database. Both NaPTAN and NPTG are maintained by DfT as national databases, collating data from all local transport authorities in England, Wales and Scotland.

Further details of the import agreement are available at:

• http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Import

The NaPTAN data is currently being converted to OSM format, imported by county and merged with OSM data. The first county, West Midlands, was uploaded at the end of March and data for Greater London was uploaded on Monday. It is planned to have data for the whole of the UK by the end of the year. This will mean that Open Street Map should have bus stops and other public transport points for the whole of Great Britain!

A full list of NaPTAN data added to OSM is available at:

• http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NaPTAN/edits

We’ve added a package page to CKAN at:

• http://ckan.net/package/read/uk-naptan-osm

If you are based in the UK and interested in helping out - you can check that the data in your local area is correct, as there are some ghost stops in the data, and duplicates where transport access points were previously added to OSM!

This is excellent news - and big kudos to the DfT for donating the data! We hope that other departments consider following suit and adding their geodata to OSM!

The import was supported by Ideas in Transit, which is “a five-year project that applies User Innovation to the transport challenges faced by individuals and society”. For more on their Open Street Map related activity, you can see the Ideas in Transit page on the OSM wiki.

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