The grass is always greener …

in defence of the

Peter Batty

Additional rules:3 Shakespeare

quotations

Ordnance Survey

Everyone’s favorite punchbag

“O most pernicious woman!O

villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!”

Hamlet

A portion of this slide is© Crown copyright 2006

“Our taxes fund the collection of public data - yet we have to pay again to access it. [Make] it freely available

to stimulate innovation”The Guardian “Free Our Data” web site

“Why, sir, I pray, are the streets not as free for me as

for you?” Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap Tranio, Taming of the

Shrew

sadly it’s not that simple ...

Taxes only pay half of the costsCosts are ongoing, not one off

Many competing priorities for tax moneyAll geodata is not equal

Commercial companies can profit

How the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles these together! Fry,

lechery, fry!Thersites, Troilus and Cressida

Land of the Free

“For mine own part, I breathe free breath.” Armado, Love’s Labour’s

Lost

I think we I think we should raise should raise taxes or cut taxes or cut spending on spending on schools to do schools to do

better mappingbetter mapping

Slide courtesy Larry Moore, from Briefing to the USGS State Partnerships Meeting

Missing Pepsi Center

(Built 10 years ago)USGS Topo Map

TIGER dataUS Census Bureau

The US situationNo large scale “national map”

Utilities and local governments map themselves

Most cities are mapped many timesSignificant map inconsistencies

flickr.com/photos/izik/3215303355/

National Mapping Agencies

Cost

Product

Good product but

expensive

Free or cheap but product

lackingWe want to be here ...

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

flickr.com/photos/goetter/2386416953/

“Free” (taxpayers foot the whole bill) is not the right answer

Elements of a solution

Reducing costs is key – sensors and crowdsourcing

This presentation is too short to explain the entire solution !