1 Licensing Geographic Data and Services: Vision for a National Commons and Marketplace A Conceptual Model for Meeting the Needs of Government, Commercial, Scientific and Nonprofit Sectors

Professor Harlan J. Onsrud Spatial Information Science and Engineering University of Maine

Sample Domestic Uses of Geographic Data, Technologies and Systems 2

      track changes in the landscape, weather, vegetation, and water resources inventory and manage the physical facilities of utilities and city governments navigate and track automobiles, truck fleets emergency vehicles track crime profile and target consumer preferences … and

Uses 3

     analysis monitoring design maintenance mapping      inventory routing resource allocation modeling management Myriad personal, commercial, government, educational, scientific, and non-profit uses.

No longer the domain of just the specialist.

Standard practice of federal government agencies and science

 Acquire full ownership of geographic data by self collection or through purchase from private sector and distribute data without restriction

4 Licensing has emerged as a prevalent private sector business model that agencies must now consider

Why an Increase in Licensing?

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     Geographic data, as opposed to geographic creative works, are difficult to protect through copyright alone; A shift away from supplying distinct datasets to providing access to databases; The rise of subscription business models dependent on multiple subscribers despite technical ability to distribute perfect and inexpensive copies; Risk management – perfecting disclaimers through licensing; and The rise of shared cost and data maintenance partnerships.

Primary Drivers for Study 6

     A proliferation of nonstandard licensing arrangements; Difficulty in designing licenses that address the legal, economic, and public interest concerns of different levels of government; Difficulty in designing licenses that accommodate all sectors of the geographic data community; An imperfect appreciation of licensing perspectives across the geographic data community; and Lack of effective license tracking and enforcement mechanisms.

Committee Charge 7

1. To explore the experiences of federal, state, and local government agencies in licensing geographic data and services from and to the private sector using case studies such as the Landsat Program; 2. To examine ways in which licensing of geographic data and services between government and the private sector serve agency missions and the interests of other stakeholders in government data sets; 3. To identify arguments in favor of and in opposition to spatial-data licensing arrangements;

Committee Charge 8

4. To dissect newly proposed license-based models that could meet, concurrently, the spatial-data needs of government, the commercial sector, scientists, educators, and citizens; 5. To consider potential effects on spatial-data uses and spatial-technology developments of competing license/non-license approaches within the commercial sector, and 6. To analyze options that will balance the interests of all parties affected by licensing of spatial data and services to and from government.

Challenge

 What comes after the national map?

… a seamless national map at specified scales and themes  What comes after geospatial one-stop?

… a portal for searching for metadata and accessing government geographic data

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 Are the problems of producing and finding geographic data for society then solved?

Premise:

most national governments believe they will be unable to gather and maintain more than a small percent of the data users in society desire

Solution

: depend on those already gathering detailed local information to help construct and maintain the infrastructure

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Recommendation 9:

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The geographic data community should consider a

National Commons in Geographic

Information where individuals can post and acquire commons-licensed geographic data. The proposed facility would make it easier for geographic data creators (including local to federal agencies) to document, license, and deliver their datasets to a common shared pool, and also would help the broader community to find, acquire, and use such data. Participation would be voluntary

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Recommendation 10: The geographic data community should consider a

National Marketplace in Geographic

Information where individuals can offer and acquire commercial geographic data. The proposed facility would make it easier for the geographic data community to offer, find, acquire, and use existing geographic data under license. Participation would be voluntary

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Recommendation 11: The geographic data community should consider a system of “data donations” in which anyone who sells data using the National Marketplace in Geographic Information automatically agrees to donate their data to the commons after a commercially reasonable time, which we provisionally set at five years

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Recommendation 12: Federal agencies should investigate options for and encourage development of a National Commons and Marketplace in Geographic Information

Typical Architecture Environments:

1. Desktop

- software and data on your machine but data may be drawn from anywhere on the web

2. Multipurpose or database focused

- (a) many users accessing and using same remote database (e.g. spatial appliances) (b) many users potentially drawing from and updating multiple standardized databases

3. Web services

- stand alone that anyone can access or distributed and shared, highly focused GIS applications

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Problem:

Assume tens of thousands of common people creating spatial works on desktops

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• Middle school biology teacher - detailed tree map • Community group - 3D animation of how pollutants moving through water supply system • Local government - detailed map files about storm and sanitary sewers, streets, water lines, power lines, … • Scientists - glaciologist, epidemiologist, …

Currently, spatial data is very difficult for the common person to find, use and share Whether sharing or selling data or services, producers and users cannot find each other efficiently nor agree on terms of use efficiently Problems not resolved by most current national visions

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Incentive Premise for Sharing Spatial Data:

Many creators would be more than willing to share their spatial data sets if: (1) it was much easier to do, (2) creators could reliably retain credit and recognition for their contributions to the public commons, (3) liability exposure minimized, and (4) obtain benefits: non-monetary (long-term archiving, increased recognition, peer review, credibility,

19 Conceptual Design of Public Commons for Geographic Data

- redirect technological and legal approaches towards providing

incentives

for sharing local data and

enabling

sharing

20 Approach

- peer-to-peer file sharing system that automatically supports

open access licenses

,

user friendly metadata creation

, and documents

parent lineage

of any newly submitted public commons data set (i.e. central server at least for indexing and possibly archiving)

21 Analogy:

Citeseer for spatial data (common pool resource) but with clarity of legal issues

Proof of Concept

- prototype user interface for delivery of data and downloading data - see http://www.spatial.maine.edu/geodatacommons

For more information on

Commons and Marketplace Approaches

See: Licensing Geographic Data and Services http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11079.html

Research and Development Challenges http://www.spatial.maine.edu/geodatacommons Science Commons http://science.creativecommons.org

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