Two cheers for INSPIRE

Inspire decision, Free Our Data: the blog, November 22, 2006.  Excerpt:

The European parliament and council of ministers have finally agreed a compromise wording to the Inspire directive designed to harmonise spatial information around Europe. The directive had become a cause celebre in the movement to make public sector data freely available. Broadly, the European parliament backed our position, while the council of ministers was opposed.

Here's today's announcement of the compromise, hammered out on Tuesday night (after this week's Technology Guardian went to press)....

"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." ...

Satu Hassi, a Green MEP from Finland who was closely involved with the negotiations, told me this morning that while she was not 100% satisfied with the outcome, the compromise at least puts some limits on data charges. In particular, it prohibits what she calls "arbitrary charging" - a finance ministry cannot suddenly decide to double the price of an information asset....

To sum up? Well, obviously the outcome isn't what we'd have hoped for. Inspire isn't going to end the absurd practice of public bodies spending time and effort negotiating rights and paying royalties for using data already owned by the taxpayer. (In Hassi's words: "a ridiculous zero-sum game".)

We're not downhearted, however. Thanks to Inspire, the argument for freeing public sector information has been made at ministerial level in every government in Europe. It is on the mainstream agenda....