Last month Ordnance Survey's GeoDataViz team published a series of three tutorials demonstrating how to visualise data in QGIS, Kepler, and Tableau. The visualisations were produced in collaboration with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and make use of two tabular datasets, RNLI Lifeboat Station Locations and Return of Service 2008 – 2016.
RNLI innovation manager Will Roberts has followed up with a post: Using open data to save lives.
The OS tutorials are clearly written and useful. But unfortunately the RNLI datasets are not open data.
RNLI currently publishes nine datasets on its Esri-based "Open Data" site. Use of these datasets, including those highlighted in the OS tutorials, is subject to the terms of a bespoke licence.
The licence is hidden in a popup window and the text is difficult to read as it seems to be have been pasted from a HTML source file. Here's a cleaned up version:
Much of the wording in this licence has been copied from the Open Government Licence, which is an open licence. However RNLI has made changes and added clauses that make the terms of its custom licence non-compliant with the Open Definition.
Following is a summary of defects in the RNLI licence.
Revocable
Clause 1.2 makes the licence "revocable". Open licences are not revocable by the licensor; they are irrevocable provided the licensee complies with the terms. The licensor can decide to stop releasing data under an open licence, but the licensee retains rights to use any data obtained prior to that change.
Non-transferable and non sub-licensable
Clause 1.2 also makes the licence "non-transferable" and "non sub-licensable". An open licence allows redistribution of the work, in whole or part, with the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original work. That's hard to do if the licence is neither transferrable nor sub-licensable.
No change to content
Clause 1.2(c) allows the licensee to adapt the data, but only into different formats. 1.3(c) prohibits any change to the content of the dataset. An open licence on the other hand allows modification of the data, including the creation of derivative works for redistribution on the same terms as the original work.
Clause 1.3(g) requires licensees to indicate if they have modified the data and retain an indication of any previous modifications. This is an acceptable condition in an open licence, but makes no sense in this context as RNLI's licence doesn't allow modifications in the first place.
Limitations on use
An open licence must allow free use of the licensed work for any purpose. The licence must not restrict anyone from making use of the work in a specific field of endeavour.
RNLI's licence prohibits use of the data in any way that is "unfair or misleading, for example comparisons must be based on objective criteria and not be prejudiced by commercial interests", or that is "in breach of any rights of any third party (including intellectual property rights) or of applicable law or regulation in the United Kingdom", or that "may damage our reputation or otherwise be harmful to us or impair our ability to achieve our charitable objects".
Those are all limitations on use.
The licence also contains a weird set of linking rules: no linking from sites the licensee doesn't own, no linking if the licensee's website contains content that is "distasteful" or "pornographic", and so on. However as a link isn't mandatory I don't count this as a limitation on use of the data.
RNLI can fix its data
At the moment the datasets on RNLI's site are accessible free of charge, but are not usable as open data.
I recently blogged about the problem of "open washing" – organisations that promote themselves as open data publishers without meeting the mininum criteria. RNLI is another example.
However as I said in that post, openwashing can sometimes arise from a lack of familiarity with open data standards.
If RNLI wants to publish its datasets as proper open data I recommend adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), a widely recognised open licence that would make RNLI's data compatible with other open datasets.