Forwarded from Carta, the Canadian maps list. 

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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited
Technology site, go to http://technology.guardian.co.uk 

Canada proves itself to be genuine land of the free
Michael Cross
Thursday August 10 2006
The Guardian


Manitoba abounds in geography. The western Canadian province stretches
from the shores of Hudson Bay to the North Dakota plains, taking in some
of the world's largest freshwater lakes. Of interest, too, are the
databases describing this natural wealth.

The government of Manitoba says it was the first in Canada to make all
its
publicly funded geospatial data freely available, without any licensing
terms, to government, businesses and citizens. This is the policy that
Technology Guardian's Free our Data campaign calls on the UK government
to adopt.

Officials say that the Manitoba Land Initiative, adopted in 2000, is
based on sound business sense. "Frankly, it just did not make good
economic sense to try and sell data that the taxpayers already paid for,
and it was costing us much more to try to sell data and manage
distribution then we were making in revenue," says Harvey Pokrant,
director of the information technology services branch in the provincial
capital Winnipeg.

Under the initiative, geospatial data held by different provincial
agencies is harmonised and made available to all comers through internet
and intranet
sites. This is a vivid contrast to the UK government approach, which
encourages state bodies holding data to treat it as intellectual
property and to charge for its use, even by other parts of government.
Significantly, the Manitoba initiative includes the provincial property
registry, a contrast to England where the land registry is a separate
trading fund.

In theory, freeing data along the Manitoba model should make life easier
for
officials creating policies for environmental protection, managing
natural
resources and encouraging investment in the province. It should also
encourage the private sector to create value-added products based on
public data.

Pokrant says there is evidence that this is happening. "Since we
liberated our data holdings and placed all our data on the web, we now
have over 9,000
registered data users." The disadvantage of making data free in this way
is
that government has no immediate commercial incentive to keep its
intellectual property up to date.

Officials in Winnipeg say the land initiative is a part of an ongoing
process, not a fixed or final product. "GIS users and decision-makers
will guide future evolvement of this tool based upon their business
needs."

Could Britain follow suit? It is important to stress that Manitoba's
geography could scarcely be more different - the province is three times
the size of the UK, yet contains only 1 million people. This means that
the workload of updating databases to include new buildings and other
construction works is trivial compared with that faced by, say,
Britain's Ordnance Survey.

However, Canada is held by UK policy makers as an exemplar in several
areas of e-government. As debate intensifies over the UK's future policy
on public
sector information, the Manitoba Land Initiative deserves to attract
much
interest.

Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog: www.freeourdata.org.uk. 

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----- End forwarded message -----


Andrew Hubbertz
Librarian Emeritus
University of Saskatchewan Library

613 692 2709
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