Tagzania Blog | News and Announcements

Tagzania is committed with open geographical data. So, as other geography related web efforts are doing (Mappinghacks and La Cartoteca, for instance), we join the petition to stop the Inspire directive that the European Parliament is about to discuss these days.

For instance, there is imagery collected by public agencies for much of Europe, detailed ortophotography that, if available in an open way, would make map mashups and sites like Tagzania even more awesome that there are nowadays. Searching for a postal address, and getting a lat/lon location with that would also be possible, if official postal services decided to open their databases. These data are available in many EU countries, they are administered by public bodies, and they are financed by taxpayers.

Those data could be made public... Let's give time to governments to think about it. But the problem with this directive is that, if approved, INSPIRE will entrench this  policy of charging citizens for information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state copyright over geographic information. Freeing data in the future will be more difficult.

PublicGeodata is a new "awareness campaign" site that has been set up to inform about Inspire. There is a petition to stop this directive there. We encourage our European users to visit that site, get informed, and, if you believe in open and collaborative maps, please sign the petition available. Public Geo Data is a collaborative website, so, you can contribute directly there as well.