I am a constituent of yours, an software developer and writer about open source Geographic Information Systems, which use geographic data to tie together, and represent, different kinds of civic, social, infrastructure and planning information.

I'm writing to draw your attention to the upcoming reading in the European Parliament of the proposed INSPIRE directive on spatial data, scheduled for the 6th June 2005 agenda item 37.

This is a Directive that claims to "support environmental protection policies as well as infrastructure development, agriculture and maritime navigation" by creating a set of "implementing rules" for exchanging geographic information. 

There are several problems with this piece of legislation;

- It has been drawn up by a committee of representatives of National Mapping Agencies such as the Ordnance Survey. Many interest groups, collectors of spatial data and users of that data, have not been consulted in its construction. The marine and oceanographic community asked for their data sets to be *excluded* from those covered by the INSPIRE Directive; it is more constrictive than many current data sharing agreements.

- There is heavy emphasis on the "implementing rules" which will be binding on each Member State, and with which all data-producing agencies - including local government and research efforts - will have to comply. The "implementing rules" are never described; there no agreement as to the standards involved. There no process for open consultation, for agreement on best practise; no assessment of the technical and economic impact they will cause to participants.  

- The proposed Directive contains a clause which effectively allows the European Commission to establish a common licensing and pricing policy across Member States, within three months from a time of its choosing; with no more agreement necessary than an unrepresentative committee of National Mapping Agency representatives. Article 24 of the current proposed Directive states:

  "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."

In the United States, all state collected spatial information is available free of cost in the public domain, through simple web download facilities. A next-generation, burgeoning internet industry of local search and mobile, location-based services is dependent on access to geographic data. Canada and Australia are moving towards open geodata policies. But Europe is moving to reinforce price-barrier restrictions on access to state-held map data; to reduce potential for innovation in non-profit and research settings.  

Local government is a big holder and collector of spatial data (75% of information collected by government has a spatial component. The INSPIRE Directive will add to local government's current cost burden of licensing the data from the National Mapping Agency. The demands of INSPIRE's unspecified "implementing rules" will impose a great cost burden on already stretched local government, forcing authorities to recoup costs by charging more for public access to public information. 

INSPIRE is one-sided legislation, drawn up by a cartel of government agencies who fear for their own future viability in an increasingly competitive commercial digital mapping world. INSPIRE side-steps the debate on public access to state-collected information, and the commercial re-use of state-owned information; but access to geographic data is at the heart of this debate. We need access to geographic and environmental data to make sense of our world; to analyse voting patterns, to allocate and discover public services, to scrutinise at an environmental and civic level the impact of government's plans for the future.

The powers conferred on the Commission to impose a licensing and pricing policy at will in Article 24 are unreasonable. Article 20(1) states that 'discovery' and 'viewing' services for environmental spatial information should be available for free; to really perform a public service approaching the quality of that now offered by the US government, Article 20(1) should be extended to guarantee free *download* access data, 18(1)(c), by EU citizens.

Please consider using your power as an MEP not to rubberstamp this decision, but to call into question the implications of charging a heavy price for citizen's access to the information we need to make sense of the world.


Yours,

Jo Walsh