Free the Postcode!

While writing my last post I came across this initiative (Free the Postcode!) from a link on Chris Fleming’s website. The website says:

“The postcode database - which turns a postcode to a latitude/longitude and back - is not free in the UK. In fact, it's very expensive. The Post Office owns it and sells it to various companies that make use of it for things like insurance or parcel tracking. There are however many people who'd like to use it for non-profit purposes. Say you want to lay out events like free concerts / gigs on a map and you only have the postcode... you have to buy the database.
Instead, wouldn't it be nice if it was free like zipcodes are in the US? To do this, you have to have a number of people collaborating with GPS units who note positions and postcodes. Hence this site to collect that data.”

It then provides a way for people to enter data that they have collected themselves with a GPS. My little knowledge of GPS was gained on some work I did on the GRADE project (Scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction). If you’re interested in the issues involved in the reuse of geospatial data you can take a look at the project here.

Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)

For those of you in Edinburgh and around - this talk by Chris Fleming of the OpenStreetMap project looks interesting:

Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)
Wednesday 14 November 2007
6.00 for 6.30 p.m.
at
The Faculty of Advocates, McKenzie Building (behind Fringe Office) High Street, Edinburgh


The announcement says:

"The OpenStreetMap project is a way of creating a free crowd sourced map allowing users use of the data for any purpose they might wish, avoiding some of the restrictions of both traditional mapping and seemingly free maps such as Google maps. Since it started over 5000 people in every continent have start mapping from places as diverse as Iraq, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Germany. Mapping of the whole of the Netherlands has been donated by a commercial mapping company and at the current rate of progress it is hoped that the mapping of the UK will be completed by the end of 2008.

In this talk, Chris Fleming will talk about and demonstrate the mapping process, how to create a map without violating copyright from the use of GPS devices to sources of copyright free data such as out of copyright maps and aerial photography. At its inception OpenStreetMap chose a Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution licence, and Chris will talk about the appropriateness of this licence for this kind of project, what this style of licence has encouraged and both the benefits and the limitations of the licence conditions. He will also consider alternative licences and the difficulties involved in changing licences.
Chris graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in Computer Science and Electronics in 2000. By day he works for Agilent Technologies (formally part of HP) based in South Queensferry monitoring systems for telecoms networks. While working on web development he became frustrated with the state of commercially available sources of mapping data and so became involved in the OpenStreetMap project in early 2006. Since then he has been participating in discussions around the usage and licensing of the data as well as talking about the project in Scotland and organising a mapping party in Edinburgh."

To book a place they ask that you e-mail Rosie Saunders at:
rosie.saunders@advocates.org.uk

You might also want to check out OpenGeoData. This is a blog about open maps, geographical data and OpenStreetMap.

Joint DCC and SCRIPTed Workshop - Legal Environment of Digital Curation

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and SCRIPTed online journal are
delighted to announce that they will be delivering a joint one-day workshop.
This event will take place at the University of Glasgow on November 23, 2007
and will provide a useful overview of legal considerations for non-legal
professionals who work with data. The day will consist of talks by experts
in the areas of:

-Intellectual property rights and licensing
-Data protection, freedom of information and privacy
-Data as evidence

This will be followed in the afternoon by group discussion in each of these
areas.

Intended Audience
The intended audience for this event are people who:

-Share data
-Manage data for others
-Need to preserve data
-Are setting up institutional repositories for data
-Manage collaborations depending on data

Programme
To view the programme for this event, please click here.

Venue
This event will take place in Charles Wilson Building, University of
Glasgow. This is building E15 on the following map.

Registration
You may register here.
Registration fees are £30 for DCC Associates Network members and £60 for
non-members.

Handy hint - membership of the DCC Associates Network is FREE! For more information on
becoming a member, see the Associates Network page.

Nature Precedings – pre-publication research and preliminary findings

You may have heard about Nature Precedings. It’s relevant to us in many ways - from copyright implications, to sharing of findings and ease of access to archiving and preservation.

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It is a free service which describes itself as providing a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

The site states that you should only submit material to Nature Precedings if you own the copyright (which will usually mean that you wrote it) and have the permission of any other copyright holders (e.g., in the case of a co-authored piece of work, the other authors). They specifically ask that if you are uploading a presentation you take particular care that none of your slides contain material for which you do not own the copyright.

Copyright for all documents remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence. Simply put, this means that the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited.

As well as making scientific documents citable, Nature Precedings also aims to make them globally available and stably archived. To this end, they are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about providing mirror sites of Nature Precedings content. The plan is that if, for any reason, this content becomes unavailable from Nature Publishing Group, it will continue to be available through those sites.

Last Call for The Survey of Database Licensing Practices

Primary Research Group is planning to publish a survey of library database licensing practices and is seeking survey participants. The survey will close on October 9th
2007. Academic, public, corporate, legal and special libraries
are eligible. This is an international survey open to libraries
of all countries. Participants receive a free PDF copy of the
estimated 100-page report. Data are broken out by type and size
of institution for easier benchmarking. Click here to take the 40 question
survey.

Thoughts on drafting an open data licence

Further to my previous post on the open data commons database licence I’d like to draw your attention to this post by one of the creators, Jordan Hatcher, where he discusses the thinking behind the development of the licence.

Open data commons database licence

A draft Open Data Commons Database licence has been produced by Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. It is sponsored by Talis

In Jordan's words it is:

"an attempt at a worldwide licence for databases following in the footsteps of other open /free/libre licences in both software and content. In Creative Commons terms it is an SA licence."

You can read Jordan's blog post announcing its release here.

The draft text of the licence itself is located here.

It is very important to note that this licence covers copyright and database rights over databases. It doesn’t cover the rights over the contents of databases. Because the data has been separated from the database in the licensing,
a supplemental BSD/MIT style licence for the data, intended for
factual information rather than other "contents of a database" has been provided.

There's also a discussion list set up specifically for the licence. Any comments or thoughts would be most welcome.