In late July 2004, the recommendations of the INSPIRE working group were formalised in a proposed European Commission Directive, on establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE). It is currently in codecision process with the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety committee of the European Parliament.
On the surface this appears to be a very positive Directive. It avoids making statements about a common licensing and pricing policy for government geospatial data, which were prioritised concerns in INSPIRE's initial survey. It makes provision for a common spatial data sharing mechanism and shared standards amongst agencies publishing environmentally-related data across European national governments. It guarantees the right of the public to discover, and view, this spatial data for free.
The proposed Directive suggests a budget of 3.6-5.4 million Euros per country, per year directed at this effort, which will develop a common spatial data sharing infrastructure for environmental data that can then be used to carry the vast range of census- and civil society-related data that has a spatial component.
Access to the data and the right to republish it are not free of cost under the current wording of this Directive. The right to 'transclude' online information by displaying it in the context of one's own web site or service is not covered. For most spatial information analysis systems - flood risk mapping, or environmental impact of housing planning - access to the raw data in an underlying layer is crucial.
Under the terms of INSPIRE, spatial data that is not available free of cost MUST be available through an e-commerce service. Much of the generous budget allocated to INSPIRE may go into the development of secure commercial transaction systems.
Common standards are strongly stipulated in this document, but it contains no provision for an impartial working group to decide which standards work best or are most adoptable and cost-effective.
Future data licensing terms as mentioned in Article 24 are too vague. The current wording gives the Commission carte blanche to impose common licensing and pricing terms for spatial data across Europe at a time of its choosing. The details of this are explained below.
The cost impact of INSPIRE on the many non-governmental institutions that hold, transmit and process environmental and other spatial data is not considered.
The Web Mapping Service and Web Feature Service standards published by the Open GeoSpatial Consortium don't respect artificial boundaries between 'viewing' and 'downloading' online map data. By 'viewing' a request from a Web Feature Service, you are effectively downloading a machine-readable structured representation of that data in order to 'view' it.
In order to overlay a spatial data set on a base map provided over the web, a machine-accessible interface is necessary. A typical request might be, "get me the map tile between this co-ordinate and that one, in an image this size." This request will normally look like the address of a web page and be viewable in an ordinary web browser. It is important that these requests can be sent by programs as well as humans.
The terms and conditions imposed on 'viewing' need clarification. It is important to be able to republish maps online, as well as view them. There is no mention of web-based republication of data in the INSPIRE Directive. A common use case is a freely viewable base map as a layer on a personal or community web site. Currently, web mapping services which use copyrighted data cannot provide this facility. The US Census Bureau's TIGER Map Service is an excellent service which provides all these functions free of copyright or cost-recovery.
Article 18(1) lays out the kinds of services which will have to be provided under the grounds of the INSPIRE directive.
- discovery services making it possible to search for spatial data sets and spatial data services on the basis of the content of the corresponding metadata and to display the content of the metadata
- view services making it possible, as a minimum, to display, navigate, zoom in/out, pan or overlay spatial data sets and to display legend information and any relevant content of metadata;
- download services, enabling copies of complete spatial data sets, or parts of such sets, to be downloaded.
- transformation services, enabling spatial data sets to be transformed
- "invoke spatial data services" services, enabling data services to be invoked.
Article 20 states the data availability conditions in terms of cost and access for each of these kinds of web mapping services.
- Member States shall ensure that the services referred to in Article 18(1)(a) and (b) are available to the public free of charge
- Where public authorities levy charges for the services referred to in Article 18(1)(c) or (e), Member States shall ensure that e-commerce services are available
Article 24 makes an evasive statement about licensing which is not otherwise covered in the Directive.
The Commission shall, in accordance with the procedure referred to in Article 30(2), adopt implementing rules to increase the potential of re-use of spatial data sets and services by third parties. These implementing rules may include the establishment of common licensing conditions.
So what happens in Article 30(2)?
- Where reference is made to this paragraph, Articles 5 and 7 of Decision 1999/468/EC shall apply, having regard to the provisions of Article 8 thereof. The period laid down in Article 5(6) of Decision 1999/468/EC shall be set at three months
Eh? 1999/468/EC is the Directive describing the regulatory powers of the Commission. Articles 5 and 7 describe a committee system, where the Commission consults an expert advisory body on its proposals. If there is disagreement between the committee and the Commission, or the committee elects not to voice an opinion, then the matter goes to the European Parliament.
The upshot of this seems to be that the INSPIRE proposed Directive gives the European Commission explicit permission to set data licensing and cost terms for the whole of Europe, pending the agreement of its expert group, with no further expansion of the legislation or recourse to the parliamentary process, within three months from a time of its choosing.
No outline of a proposed policy is offered in the Framework Directive, yet the 2004-09 action plan for the eurogeographics working group, well under way, calls licensing a "first priority" for 2007. Why isn't this addressed directly in the proposed Directive?
The INSPIRE directive is, as yet, only proposed by the Commission as a result of the INSPIRE survey. It is not law yet; it has to go through a codecision procedure. First the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament have to agree on a common wording, then it gets a reading in the Parliament.
The best chance of altering the terms of the directive is before it gets into first reading. Suggestions would be to extend the free-of-cost guarantee in Article 20(1) to cover 18(c), get rid of the e-commerce clause in Article 20(2) entirely, and remove the licensing clause in Article 24 entirely.
Why government geospatial data should be free (mirrored) gives a very cogent, lay-friendly account of why attempting to operate a cost-recovery policy for geospatial data generated by government agencies is not ultimately cost-effective. These seem like a good parry to the 'generating economic activity and competitiveness in the GIS industry' thrust of INSPIRE, and would be a good document to get in front of your Euro MP, or the minister of your state who sits on the Council of the European Union.
If the document is approved on first reading, it becomes binding European law. If defeated, on the second reading it can either be thrown out or go into a conciliation process of textual changes.
There has been some good work, solid process and some high ideals behind INSPIRE, and it would be a shame to waste that work by throwing it out entirely. Altering the text of INSPIRE to guarantee free-of-cost geospatial data transfer is an ideal goal.
PreLex results for 2004/0175 show that INSPIRE is in the codecision process right now. OEIL references to 2004/0175 show that there is a predicted "Forthcoming adoption by parliamentary committee:15/03/2005". Because this is ostensibly environmental legislation, is it being overseen by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety in the European Parliament. The membership of this committee may arguably not be expert on Information Society legislation, which INSPIRE really is. The homepage for the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety provides a list of its members which can be cross-referenced with their contact information by selecting the committee from this euro parliament committee search interface.
Please consider writing to your nation's representative MEP on the Environment Committee, outlining the potential cost and access problems with the INSPIRE directive as it currently stands, and suggesting amendments on the lines of covering Article 18(c) by the public access free of cost clause 20(1). Please especially do this if you are Dutch. Feel free to point to this article, or to suggest amendments to it.
A set of wiki pages discussing the background and implications of geographic data licensing and access policy in much more depth are available at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
2004-10-18