Licensing Geographic Data and Services (2004) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Geographic Data Market: Offerings, Players, and Methods of Exchange
3 The Geographic Data Market: Offerings, Players, and Methods of Exchange
Pages 39-66
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From page 39... ...
Next, it describes the structure of the marketplace and reviews the "value chain" that results from successive actors collecting, merging, and transforming raw data into products and services within the marketplace. The chapter then discusses dominant business models in geographic data transactions and the factors that influence contractual terms.
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2NRC, 1995, A Data Foundation for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, Washington, D.C., National Academies Press. 3Geodetic control refers to the common reference system for establishing coordinate positions (e.g., latitude, longitude, elevation)
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Commercial firms generate a wide variety of products and services, including off-the-shelf data and information products, for-hire data acquisition services, and custom data processing services. In addition to data, firms may offer specialized access and analysis tools, and/or Web-based services that support a variety of applications including in-vehicle navigation, location-based services, Web mapping, and asset tracking.
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Additionally, numerous companies create basic and client-specific information layers under contract or as licensed products. Value-added intermediaries provide additional value to users by enhancing preexisting public and private information.
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_____________ 6The National Map "provides public access to high-quality, geospatial data and information from multiple partners to help support decisionmaking by resource managers and the public." See |
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have very different products. Although each offering occupies the same level in the value chain, the former has 30-meter spatial resolution compared to 1 meter for the latter.
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The horizontal axis carries examples of typical markets for geographic data products and services. Boxes that span the figure illustrate levels in the value chain where market demand is sufficiently high to support standard offerings across multiple markets.
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are often generated using information-capture software to interpret raw data. Like data collection services, basic geographic information layers often span multiple markets (Figure 3-2)
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· AirPhotoUSA provides online viewing of imagery that covers the United States at levels of spatial resolution ranging from 30-meter Landsat Thematic Mapper data of the entire country to 1-meter airborne data of cities.c Visitors to the site can download informa tion, order hardcopy prints or CD-ROMs, or view data online. · TerraServer is a popular Web site that couples information access software with data.d This site facilitates searching and purchas ing imagery of various scales and sources worldwide.
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. Information analysis tools for these tasks tend to be highly specific, and are usually aimed at a single user or group of users.
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to support digital rights management approaches.19 3.5 DATA ACQUISITION-FOR-HIRE SERVICES VERSUS DATA LICENSING Value-chain businesses in the geographic data and services community usually follow one of two dominant business models: Under one model, users purchase data, with unlimited rights of use, with the provider possibly retaining the right to engage in subsequent transactions with other users. In the other dominant model, users license data, which restricts the uses that they can make of the data and/or their ability to transfer the data to others.20 Except for commercial off-the-shelf software and search/manipulation tools, the geographic information market traditionally has been based on data acquisition-for-hire services.
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Many of these products are aimed at large numbers of small consumers, and bundle information access software with large geographic datasets. Examples include digital orthoimage compilations, transportation maps, and digital line graphs (i.e., line map information in digital form)
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Additionally, the service provider faces very little risk on the specific transaction as long as it fulfills its contract, because the entire cost of the imagery is recovered from a single purchaser. Conversely, a company that creates consumer data products faces a significant risk that it could collect and process imagery that will generate no or insufficient future revenue to recover the investment.
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52 TABLE 3-1 Characteristics of Acquisition-for-Hire Service Versus Product-for-License Business Models Acquisition-for-Hire Service: Product-for-License: Standard Data Acquisition Geographic Consumer Characteristic Custom Consulting and Processing Product Definition Typically one-off service Data acquisition and Large numbers of customers engagements focused on processing services are license standard exploring the extension of sufficiently standardized deliverables. Vendors rely an existing technology that procedures can be on a high degree of into a new market, or a codified in ISO standards automation to fill requests.
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Higher misapplied. Consumer product laws reliability if performance ensure quality.
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3.6 FACTORS INFLUENCING THE CONTRACTUAL TERMS OF DATA SHARING Geographic data offerings from the commercial sector typically are differentiated by data characteristics (e.g., currency, spatial resolution, spatial accuracy, content and classification accuracy, spectral and radiometric properties, data format, ease of access and use, availability) and use restrictions.
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Commercial vendors trying to generate profits from the lower portions of the value chain (i.e., selling imagery and other geographic data gathered primarily from sensors or direct observations with little added value) often are concerned that the availability of unrestricted government data undercuts their potential markets.29 3.7 COMMON TYPES OF LICENSING STRATEGIES Companies have invented many types of licensing strategies to sell their data (see Appendix D)
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36Testimony of Don Cooke describing how GDT assembled a nationwide geographic database by obtaining rights to county- and local-scale datasets. 37Testimony of Chris Friel describing a project in which a geology consulting firm obtained permission to use and combine GIS software, database software, e-commerce software, geology data, USGS maps, insurance casualty data, and street-centerline information to develop a new property insurance estimator product.
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42As we discuss in Chapter 6, Section 6.2, guaranteed revenue arrangements in which a single user pays all or most of the costs of production while other users obtain the data at prices that are no greater than the marginal cost of distribution are likely to do reasonably well in achieving efficiency in both the production and distribution of information. 43Although not unrestricted, NGA's Clearview agreement reduced vendors' need to resell data by providing a large commitment over three years (see Appendix D, Section D.3; Roberta Lenczowski, NGA, personal communication,
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Satellite data providers have traditionally used restrictive licensing strategies to support large upfront technology and launch costs. Although firms historically have focused on selling licensed data to the defense and intelligence communities, firms are increas ingly willing to negotiate broad reuse and redistribution rights on some types of data.45 2.
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Licensing controversies often center on restrictions that limit government data availability to secondary and tertiary users. _____________ 46One long-lived exception is the sale of digital elevation models (DEMs)
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At the same time, citizens are usually end users: That is, they seldom redistribute data to tertiary users.
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Other commercial firms (e.g., utilities, information firms, resources firms) use government data without redistributing them to tertiary users.
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Ad hoc and formal Access Web based Standard media mechanism Map book or map series Web based Standard media Hard copy Value proposition Application services Official public record Web services Unvarnished content and Subscription services scope Mandate/mission Customer service Meet FOIA and Open satisfied Good will Records Transaction cost Statutory obligations avoidance Supports users _____________ 49Exceptions can occur when government puts native data in a form that is more convenient to the requester, or when government acquires data under license (in which case dissemination of these data under FOIA is subject to the terms of the agreement [Chapter 5, Section 5.4.2.1]
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Within this marketplace, the diversity of products and services is increasing and two dominant business models have emerged: all rights are sold to the purchaser but the vendor retains the right to use the work, or rights are retained by the vendor but customers are allowed to use the data under a license. Licensing has become increasingly common since the early 1990s, and secondary and tertiary users worry that licensing will restrict the availability of government data to them.
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The file and future updates may be downloaded for a stated fee by anyone, including users of personal communicators -- personal mobile devices incorporating phone, e-mail, video, Web access, data processing, and location communication capabilities along with high-volume data storage. Thousands of small businesses like Samantha Adams' are now able to create similar new products or enhanced services because they can easily discover the ownership status and licensing conditions of location-based and related datasets found on the Web.
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