The Government's recent announcement on changes to future availability of OS MasterMap (discussed in my previous post) left many questions unanswered.
Ordnance Survey originally said it would release a list of FAQs, but those haven't materialised.
We've now been invited to tune in tomorrow to a webinar organised by the Association for Geographic Information (AGI), a membership body that "exists to represent the interests of the UK's GI industry". Attendees can submit questions to info@agi.org.uk.
The webinar is billed as an opportunity to "Hear from the people leading this project: Chris Chambers, Ordnance Survey Open MasterMap Programme Lead (and AGI Council member) will be joined by Catherine McGrath and Jamie Clark on behalf of the Geospatial Commission."
McGrath and Clark seem to be Cabinet Office civil servants. Chris Chambers is both a senior product manager at OS and geospatial policy lead at Cabinet Office. (You may be able to infer from that the level of challenge Ordnance Survey has had to its plans.)
Following are the questions I've submitted for the webinar, with notes.
Is the Geospatial Commission operational yet?
So far the work of the Commission has been fronted by civil servants and secondees from other public sector organisations.
In what sense is the GC actually a "commission" at this point? No co-chairs or commissioners have been announced and there are no published terms of reference.
Hasn't Cabinet Office's Geospatial Unit rather hamstrung the GC by agreeing the outcome of its keystone project before the commissioners are even in place?
Why was there no public consultation to inform development of the MasterMap plans?
Cabinet Office had nearly eight months, between the Autumn Budget announcement and this month's MasterMap announcement, to consult the public on the role of MasterMap and Ordnance Survey in the nation's geospatial strategy.
Instead all we had was an invite-only industry breakfast and some desultory workshops targeted at MasterMap's existing user base.
I'm reminded that prior to the OS OpenData launch in 2010 the government of the day managed a full public consultation within a much shorter timeframe.
Geospatial strategy is vital to our economic policy. The Geospatial Commission should operate transparently in accordance with the ethos of open government and open policymaking.
What does Ordnance Survey mean by "property extents"?
This month's announcement says a dataset described as "Property extents created from OS MasterMap Topography Layer" will be available under the Open Government Licence. But who will release this data?
Property extents define ownership. Ordnance Survey doesn't record ownership of property or land, and property extents do not map cleanly to any particular class of features in the Topography Layer.
Land Registry said in a Linkedin post last week that once the MasterMap policy changes have been implemented "customers will be able to access our INSPIRE polygon data as a truly open dataset".
This is not as exciting as it sounds. Land Registry's INSPIRE Index Polygons is a spatial dataset that contains boundaries for the locations of freehold registered property in England and Wales. The data has been accessible to the public for some years, though not as open data because the polygons themselves contain data derived from MasterMap.
However INSPIRE Index Polygons is only subset of the full index polygons dataset. As Land Registry says, an INSPIRE Index Polygon may contain several separate polygons and the extent of the land contained in any registered title cannot be established from those polygons. To actually determine property extents we would need Land Registry to release the National Polygon dataset.
So does the commitment on "property extents" involve any direct release of open data by Ordnance Survey? Even if Land Registry was minded to publish its land ownership polygons, that would not provide full coverage of land ownership in England and Wales.
And what about Scotland? The equivalent authority there, Registers of Scotland (RoS), has no track record on open data and is apparently outside the scope of the Geospatial Commission's work.
What will be the thresholds for free access to MasterMap data via the proposed APIs?
Ordnance Survey has also said other datasets derived from MasterMap will be made available free of charge up to a threshold of transactions through APIs.
However we don't yet know at what level that threshold will be set, and whether it will vary by customer type or the purposes for which the data will be used.
What will be the terms of re-use for data extracted via the APIs?
I'm assuming Ordnance Survey does not intend to allow re-use of data extracted via the APIs under the Open Government Licence, as that would have been a major point in the announcement.
However increasing "free" use of MasterMap without rights to openly share and redistribute the data means that the free tier is likely to exacerbate the derived data problem we already have with free (but non-open) use by licensees under the PSMA. Users will inevitably incorporate free MasterMap data into their own products, undermining flexibility in the information economy and further poisoning the well for open geospatial data in Britain.