WRITTEN ON March 18th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized

Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing flags some Euro-geodata-madness*

Europe seeking to make open mapping impossible – help!
Your help is needed to fight a move that could see all the geographic information in Europe locked away and available only to well-heeled corporations, but not to activists, nonprofits, individuals and startups.

The EU’s INSPIRE directive is supposed to harmonize the way that European mapping agencies share their geo-data, but the process has been hijacked. Now it looks more like a proprietary, restrictive, monopoly pricing policy that guts open access.

Dooes this stop future Google maps mashups? Presumably not, since that’s Google mappng data. Does it just hand the online geo-future to Google on a plate? As if they werent taking it anyway. I dont like the sound of this, and Cory is usually right, but I’m too preoccupied to get in a fuss about this. * Thanks Dave!