Licensing Geographic Data and Services (2004) / Chapter Skim
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9 New Institutions
9 New Institutions
Pages 205-226
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The second explores the related concepts of a national commons and marketplace for geographic information. The third _____________ 1Addressing the committee's sixth task, and also aspects of its fourth and fifth tasks.
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Building new mechanisms and institutions to make licensing more productive will require sustained initiatives by federal, state, and local agencies, and, in many cases, the private sector.2 9.2 STRUCTURAL INTERVENTIONS 9.2.1 Standard Licenses and Form Agreements Geographic data contracts come in a diverse range of styles and levels of complexity. Contracts for large transactions often are negotiated "from scratch." Contracts for small transactions often use idiosyncratic "form contracts" that differ from vendor to vendor.
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Recommendation: Agencies, trade associations, and public interest groups should exercise leadership in promoting standard clauses and form licenses throughout the geographic data community. _____________ 5Testimony of Chris Friel, GIS Solutions Inc.
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Second, government can create institutions that achieve coordination "automatically." Automation and market signals hold great promise for improving large-scale coordination within and among federal, state, and local government levels.6 9.2.2.1 Multiagency Licenses Individual agencies have a strong incentive to participate in licensing arrangements that cut across traditional agency functions. In most cases, the rewards are bulk discounts and shared transaction costs.
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has been particularly active in organizing uplift rights around specific projects and geographic areas (e.g., the NOAA/Intermap Santa Cruz/San Mateo County digital elevation model license that provided uplift rights for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) , USGS, and a private partner)
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12The NGA's proposed National Commercial Imagery Strategy to coordinate satellite data procurement within the defense community was followed by USGS's suggestion of a parallel civilian strategy as part of its National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Initiative.
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The basic concept is sound and could yield substantial savings for the federal government, assuming that at least some previously licensed data are relevant to current needs and the limitations on use are not onerous to understand or meet. Data brokerages will become increasingly feasible if government and industry start to use standardized licenses.
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· Standard License Provision Search Capability. A compromise between data brokerages and B2G might be to develop and sup port a standard license provision search capability for geographic data.15 Each time a government agency licenses data from a vendor allowing limited use by others or acquires uplift rights from a vendor, the agency would post the specific license terms (ideally reduced to a uniform code)
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Facilitating the sharing of and trade in data through the development of an efficient and user-friendly system, including a well-organized commons connecting users and contributors and an efficient market connecting buyers and sellers, would be a valuable endeavor.17 Although no such online environment currently exists for geographic data, The National Map, Geospatial One-Stop, and the NSDI provide first steps. In this section we describe a vision for a National Commons and Marketplace in Geographic Information.18 In a later section we suggest how the two might be integrated and operate seamlessly, and discuss options for who should develop and host them.
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To succeed, the commons could provide easy, effective, and integrated mechanisms that could, for example, · enable any geographic dataset creator to construct a license that grants permission to use his or her data, · enable novice creators to quickly generate accurate and substan tive standardized metadata for a geographic data file, · enable data contributors to take advantage of form liability disclaimers, · embed identifiers automatically in any commons dataset so that any future user can link back and recover the detailed metadata and license conditions for the file, · allow for deeper search capabilities of geographic data and metadata than are currently available, and · provide a long-term archive for commons geographic datasets. Initial components of a National Commons could be implemented almost immediately with minimal investment (e.g., the first three bulleted items might be implemented as extensions of Geospatial One-Stop and Creative Commons efforts)
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Last, the commons license model21 gives value-adders the ability to charge for the service of transferring their work to others22 and a variety of support services.23 However, data contributors would receive no royalties or rents from others for use of their data. Recommendation: The geographic data community should consider a National Commons in Geographic Information where citizens can post and acquire commons-licensed geographic data.
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Box 9-1 Conceptual Model for a National Commons in Geographic Information: Possible Operational Characteristicsa 1. A nonexpert user creates a geographic dataset that she or he wants preserved and accessible to the rest of the world.
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cThis intellectual property management system begins with an assumption of open access by all to the datasets as opposed to more traditional digital rights management architectures that begin with the assumption that only users with authorization should be granted access. The unique identifier may or may not be a "hash," that is, an identifier based on the digital file's contents.
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Yet, as discussed in previous chapters, the ability to find, assess, and acquire these data could be far more efficient -- to the benefit of all. A national marketplace in geographic information would provide an online environment where any seller or licensor, no matter how small, could efficiently post its geographic data offerings in a searchable form using a menu of standard license choices and metadata reporting.
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In response to a transcript, the data supplier mixes and matches desired standard license provisions, and is led through a process for standardized posting of its price schedule.
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could make agency licensing more efficient, reduce wasteful duplication between agencies, accelerate the availability of local datasets in the public domain and commons, improve archiving of geographic data, increase the range of geographic data products available to consumers, and foster competition among private vendors. However, these outcomes are far from inevitable.
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In exchange for this service, agencies could adopt the following rule: Creators who post a data file for sale over the "marketplace component" must at the same time deposit a copy of the data file in escrow to the secured archives of the National Commons and Marketplace. Escrowed files become available after five years through a New Partnerships in Remote Sensing: Government, the Private Sector, and Earth Science Research, Washington, D.C., National Academies Press; NRC, 2003, Using Remote Sensing in State and Local Government: Information for Management and Decision Making, Washington, D.C., National Academies Press.
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, which states that agencies should "convert licensed data to the public domain data by negotiating termination dates for license restrictions. The appropriate termination date may vary depending on the specific data type." See also the first two recommendations in National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive Advisory Committee, 2000, Access to Restricted Data: A White Paper, available at: |
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A successful National Commons and Marketplace would reinvigorate the public domain by making geographic data easier to find, share, and exchange. Timed donations would increase the flow of formerly proprietary data into the public domain and commons.
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The National Commons and Marketplace could operate as a stand-alone business like CommerceOne, a private corporation. A stand-alone business model would be similar to the vendor-operated case, except that a neutral third party not offering data products itself would have no incentive to "steer" consumers toward certain products.
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First, agencies would need to arrange for or accommodate virtual or physical integration between The National Map, Geospatial One-Stop, and related federal geographic data programs on the one hand, and the privately operated National Commons and Marketplace on the other. Second, agencies would need to ensure that a privately operated National Commons and Marketplace did not lead to significant antitrust and economic inefficiency problems.
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These benefits should extend beyond the agency and their immediate stakeholders to embrace the broader public interest. A well-organized geographic data commons connecting users and contributors and an efficient market connecting buyers and sellers could make agency licensing more efficient, reduce wasteful duplication between agencies, accelerate the availability of local datasets in the public domain and commons, improve archiving of geographic data, increase the range of geographic data products available to consumers, and foster competition among private vendors.
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