La directiva INSPIRE que está en debate en el parlamento europeo (y que, de aprobarse, creará estándares y datos geoespaciales "cerrados") ha tenido la "virtud" de generar una respuesta que se está concretando en iniciativas como Public Geo Data que defienden que "State-collected geographic data is public property" (ya hablamos de este tema).
En el mismo sentido, Free our data es una campaña desarrollada en Gran Bretaña para que los contribuyentes puedan acceder a los datos generados con sus impuestos. The Guardian ha publicado un genial artículo, What price information?, donde muestra de un modo muy claro y didáctico el sinsentido ético, político y económico que supone que los estados europeos pretendan hacer negocio vendiendo los datos (en particular los geodatos) que crean con los impuestos a sus propios ciudadanos:
Why is it that an American company - Google - has made it easier to create maps of the UK that merge data together than the UK's own mapping agency? Why do so many companies that want to get into the mapping market in the UK discover the government-backed agency that should be their data provider is often also a competitor?
The answer is that the data that we pay to have collected (through our taxes), and which is then used by organisations such as the Ordnance Survey, is not freely available for re-use by UK citizens. We, and the companies that could benefit from its use, are forced to pay for it - putting a brake on the information economy.
The campaign launched here last week to Free our data aims to end that asymmetrical setup, and oblige the data collectors to remain taxpayer-funded, and to provide data for free re-use. It brought an avalanche of responses, almost every one of which backed the idea.
Además el artículo describe todo el potencial de la web 2.0, explicando que son los mashups que se realizan sobre las nuevas formas de cartografía que ejemplifica Google Maps (no está nada mal para un artículo de un medio "tradicional"). En este sentido cita a Kevin Werbach para dejar claro, en contra del pensamiento europeo, que los estándares abiertos son un buen modelo de negocio (mientras Europa lucha contra Google, EEUU y algunos ciudadanos europeos innovan y crean riqueza sobre Google):
"eBay, Amazon, and Google: three mega-success stories of the dotcom era. What do they have in common? All of them aggressively open up their technical interfaces, allowing other sites to plug into them, or projecting themselves out to the rest of the Web ... the new paradigm of commerce and business relationships is syndication. Open up your core assets and turn them into a platform; don't hide behind high walls and expect everyone to come to you."
Y para finalizar una muestra del absurdo de las políticas europeas de acceso a los datos públicos:
Sometimes, the intellectual property walls are absurd. One correspondent (requesting anonymity) noted that an international arrangement means that weather data is shared for free between national weather agencies. Thus a Birmingham-based company found it was more economic to set up an office in San Francisco and get the UK weather data under US Freedom of Information laws from the US weather service and then pass it back to the Birmingham head office. (The weather services subsequently closed that loophole.)
