In my previous post I blogged some questions in advance of this week's AGI webinar on 'Open MasterMap'. This is a follow-up post with notes on the responses from Ordnance Survey and representatives of the Geospatial Commission.
Thanks to the chair Abigail Page for covering most of the questions I submitted. (I understand many attendees submitted similar questions.)
AGI has made available a recording of the webinar. Elliot Hartley has also tweeted a couple of key slides.
Prior to the webinar I had some concerns about whether an industry webinar was the appropriate format for Ordnance Survey to release actionable information about its plan to open up MasterMap.
Fortunately that wasn't a problem. There was little new information. However following are some points I picked up from the briefing.
There will be a Geospatial Commission consultation
The Geospatial Commission has been formally operational since April and Cabinet Office is still recruiting staff.
There was no word on when the co-chairs or commissioners would be announced, but I will be surprised if it is much longer.
The Commission will run a public consultation later this summer. This is welcome news, though presumably the consultation will cover geospatial strategy broadly rather than the MasterMap plan in medias res.
Ordnance Survey isn't quite sure what it means by "property extents"
OS was unable to provide a clear answer on which data from the Topography Layer will be released under the Open Government Licence as the "property extents" dataset. There will be discussions.
There does seem to be an intention that OS will release property extents data directly, rather than simply allowing Land Registry to release it as derived data in their own land polygons.
However the format of any OS release hasn't been decided. Rather alarmingly, I did not hear any firm commitment to release of a bulk dataset.
There was no clarification of the timeline for any of the measures in this month's MasterMap announcement. But OS "won't be releasing anything in the short term".
It's increasingly plain that nobody at Cabinet Office or Treasury is exactly holding OS's feet to the fire on this plan.
I don't think Land Registry was actually mentioned during the webinar. But any definition of "property extents" that OS comes up with must surely remove the derived data constraints that currently prevent Land Registry from unlocking its land polygons.
So why not press ahead with that now? The INSPIRE Index Polygons are already online. There's no obvious reason why Ordnance Survey and Land Registry could not update the terms and make this dataset immediately available as open data.
No information on transaction thresholds for free APIs
Apparently setting transaction thresholds at the right level for the proposed "free" APIs requires market analysis, with reference to existing available solutions, etc.
Really this is oddly vague considering somebody in government has managed to calculate £130m in annual benefits from this plan. But there you go.