National address database back on the agenda?

Thanks to Graham Hyde for pointing to this letter from Sir Michael Scholar, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority to John Healey, Minister for housing and a selection of other ministers.

In a rebuttal of frequent assertions by both NLPG and OS that they already offer comprehensive national coverage he says

The main reason behind the decision that ONS should invest a substantial budget in the development of a special one-off register of addresses was that it needed it for the Census: the existing sources of address data were some way short of the comprehensive and accurate coverage that was required for Census purposes.

He also questions the claim by CLG that government departments can undertake their duties without a national address database.

For an intragovernmental letter this seems quite strong stuff.

Only the parties to the failed NSAI initiative know the real reasons that it fell through at the eleventh hour. Is it time to try to resuscitate NSAI?

Has the US Air Force not heard of OGC?

Andrew Turner pointed to this announcement by USAF Academy of a sole sourcing opt out of competitive tender for GI software here

This bit got my attention. "Software standardization between the 10th CES, DFEG, and the entire USAFA is extremely critical. Compatibility allows GIS data sharing between all agencies on the USAFA will continue to support GIS development in the future. Award of this contract to another contractor would jeopardize the performance of our mission by making all of the existing GIS data non-usable."

And I thought ESRI were a platinum corporate super supporter of OGC and interoperability standards!

The contract is rated at up to $25m. Vendor lockin can be very profitable.

From Ordnance Survey to Philip K Dick

Sometimes the web can take you on a strange journey.

This letter from Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS Union about creeping privatisation happened to mention OS as a potential candidate for a governemnt sell off along with Land Registry, Met Office and Hydrographic Office. Nothing new there really as the possibility has been touted in the FT and elsewhere.

The letter was in response to an article entitled "We are outsourcing the future, to be built by Thatcher and Philip K Dick" and that in turn offered a link to the Guardian's biography of my life long scifi hero

So there you go from OS to PK Dick in just 3 clicks

Probably need to get back to work now

Whose map is it anyway?

A couple of tweets from GeoWeb yesterday got me thinking.

Apparently Michael Jones of Google was somewhat contradictory saying that what you put into Google you should be able to get out and then confirming that you could not get the content out of MapMaker. Does that matter? The data is free to view and to use (if you don't need to access the vectors) through the Google Maps API or the Maps site.

TA & Navteq provide opportunities for user contributed QA but no way of retrieving or use let alone reuse.

At the other end of the scale (excuse pun) is an open data product like OSM where with very limited licensing conditions anyone regardless of whether they have contributed to building the dataset can access the data and use, reuse etc.

If you contribute data to a project should you be able to get it back? Either to withdraw your contribution, to extract a copy of what you contributed or to extract other peoples contributions?

Makes you wonder why people volunteer geographic information.