If you’re interested in the development of GALILEO, the European satellite navigation system, you should have a look at the green paper published by the European Commission.
It gives a good overview, raises a few questions about future GALILEO applications and gives thereby a slight insight into the commission’s view of that project. (via TecnoMaps)
An agreement on the INSPIRE-directive between the European Council and Parliament has been reached last night. The press release doesn’t provide many details but it looks like that public European geodata will remain where it is now:
Data search services designed for the public will generally be free of charge, although the directive allows fees to be charged for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports.
Basically I think INSPIRE is an important step for a common European data policy. But still I wish our governments would have taken the chance of pushing the European geospatial industry by agreeing on a more courageous directive.
According to a study on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, 8bn EUR of potential added value lie safely behind closed doors in the form of public geodata.
A few interesting posts about the Geo Business Kongress on the German Geograffiti blog lead me to the conclusion that the aim of the European geodata policy is probably to vaporize its potential by doing nothing but creating one working group after another until some private companies have caught up, can substitute national mapping agencies and do their job with less effort and better license agreements.
I remember quite a similar study about the situation in Austria, stating an immense economic potential by freeing public geodata. What did it help? Nothing.
European geodata policy seems irrational and mainly driven by political lobbying.
Whenever I have to deal with the European Environmental Agency, I’m deeply impressed by their data service. Basically it’s very simple, no or little fancy online mapping applications, but therefore it offers fast and easy to use data searching and data browsing features. I wish more European Agencies would offer such a service. Finding the right data or indicators can be painfully and, at the worst, take ages.
Besides the downloads, a very convenient feature is that the EEA data service manages your agreements. Especially in the case of national data sets (e.g. Corine land cover) in cross-border regions it’s very useful and time saving. You select the data, fill out a form and the data service takes care about the agreement with each involved national agency. You see all given permissions and details in one single overview, without the need of finding the right person to ask in each country.
Well, finding and talking to the right person can result in new projects, but in this case I was only interested in getting the data quickly.
Sometimes it’s better to have a second look at the wording before translating a campaign name directly into a domain. Stripping out some blanks can easily create new and, above all, unwanted words.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this site of the European commission is blocked by some corporate firewalls:
http://ec.europa.eu/growthandjobs/
What did you read?
Jared Bendedict succeeded in his Map Ransom mission and made, as promised, all his purchased data available for download at the Libre Map Project. (via James Fee GIS Blog)
Congratulations, great work!
I was thinking if a similar initiative would succeed here too, but I’m afraid that European copycats would need fundings similar to GNPs of some medium insular state, a bunch of excellent attorneys and a lobbyist better than Nick Nayler to buy and finally free the data of its public copyright.
It’s quite clear that collecting high quality geodata is cost intensive and since there is a noticeable political pressure on public authorities, such as most national mapping agencies are, to act like private companies it’s understandable that they don’t want or can’t distribute their core business freely.
The point is, that small European businesses, start-ups or single geo-developers who can’t afford licensing all needed European geodata are forced to test run their services and applications with American geodata, like the one at Libre Map Project, and deal with American spatial issues or to make use of one of the available geo APIs (mostly focusing the US of course).
Is it in the interest of the European Union to direct grass-root innovation from Europe to the US?
What would be the problem of making outdated European public geodata freely available? Most people would be fine with that. I believe it would ease and push innovation (anyone remembering the Lisbon Strategy?) in the geo industry a lot, simply because geo applications heavily depend, already during conceptual work and development, on data – no data, no development.
Mr Wolfgang Sporrer at the ZEIT blogs has a few good points why the European Union (we all together!) should care about the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia.
Apparently the only alternative to the Russian pipeline which brings us natural gas-heated Europeans cosiness during the upcoming winter months is crossing the Caucasian region. As we have seen last winter, we don’t want to depend too much on the morning mood of Mr Putin.
Besides the selfish resources supply motives there are some more good reasons for intervention, e.g. humanitarian help or respect of international law, too, of course…
Statistic lectures should always begin by explaining the importance of homogeneous region codes. I spent days of my life cleaning up individually invented region codes which are supposed to match other regional data sets. Even in some EU administration departments they prefer customising instead of using official NUTS or ISO codes.
Apparantly GoYellow is doing what Google Local plans to do in the German market, and they are doing it quite well! Is it possible that non global players mean some serious regional competition to Google in that segment?
I didn’t notice any press coverage so far. Only Margot Wallström’s blog directed my attention to Debate Europe. Surely a great idea towards the right direction. Take part and share your view of Europe’s future.