WRITTEN ON July 16th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Online Maps

Last night’s post brings in first thing this morning a mail from Urban Tapestries project (man they’re fast). This explored shared location-based discussion in public space – a online manifestation of shared urban intelligence. They did two animations to illustrate the idea: this and this. really clever.

Then they have a second two-year research project called Social tapestries.

Beautifully designed. Uses OS Mastermap. Giles Lane also drafted a non-profit/non-commercial license for free access to National Mapping Agency GIS data – see below – so it’s a fair bet he’s got a lot to say about all this.

We have been collaborating with the Ordnance Survey (they
took part in a Creative Lab of ours back in September last year where
we explored some specific ideas along these lines) over the last two
years — integrating their MasterMap with our ‘public
authoring’ (spatial annotation) system. As part of this collaboration
I have developed and formally submitted a Creative Commons-style licence (non-profit/non-commercial use only) for the OS to consider
adopting for free access to their map data.

We’re meeting with their head of licensing strategy next week to
discuss this further and help the OS understand the wider benefits of
CC licensing (such as proposed by the Creative Archive Licensing Group).

Good luck – let us know what happens!