SDI Convergence - Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association

SDIs are not for free, and thus need to be funded. Frederika Welle Donker discusses in
Public Sector Geo Web Services: Which Business Model Will Pay for a Free Lunch?
what business models and financial models may provide a solid financial base for public
sector geographic web services. Web services are an effective way to make public
sector geo-information available. They allow information to be accessed directly at the
source and to be combined from different sources. Such a situation is envisaged by
INSPIRE. However, the costs of web services are high and revenues do not always
cover the costs. Her assessment concludes that the current business models and financial
models, especially the cost recovery models, have to be reconsidered to provide
sustainable funding for quality services.
An issue closely related to the funding model is in enforcing and managing use rights
for these services. In Standard Licences for Geographic Information: the Development
and Implementation in Local Government in Italy Luigi Garretti, Silvana Griffa, Roberta
Lucà and MariaTeresa Lopreiato introduce a model that is promising to satisfy some of
the concerns of service providers. Web services and digital media make it easy to access
information, including geographic information. Geographic information moving
across digital networks may limit the power of content providers to control the use of
their ‘intellectual property’. Piedmont Region, Italy, is developing a new business model
for licensing geographic information. It aims to realise a complete policy guideline to
regulate the use and dissemination of Piedmont’s geographic information through a set
of standard electronic licences. Based on digital rights management principles, a new
electronic licensing model was developed fully adhering to the INSPIRE principles. The
model promotes sharing and re-use of geographic information through services.
In Legal Simcity; Legislative Maps and Semantic Web Supporting Conflict Resolution,
Rob Peters, Rinke Hoekstra, Tom van Engers and Erik Hupkes present an atlas service,
this time focused on legislation applying to a location. Their Legal Atlas should
stimulate participatory decision-making by providing answers to questions like “where
will I be able to develop wasteland?” Four levels of legislation (European, national, regional
and local) are assessed by Legal Atlas. Through a Simcity approach users will
be able to go through the map and see per location the possibilities. The application
has been successfully tested by end-users in the Dutch province of Flevoland. Legal
Atlas also overcomes the difficulty of visualising temporal factors in environmental legislation,
like INSPIRE, such as breeding seasons.
New technological opportunities becoming reality through new services may also challenge
legislative frameworks established in periods in which these services were nonexistent.
Location based services, for example, now raise these new questions to privacy
legislation. In Power and Privacy: the Use of LBS in Dutch Public Administration,
Charlotte van Ooijen and Sjaak Nouwt assess how the use of location-based information
about citizens in public administration, such as road pricing systems may affect the
meaning of citizenship by shifting the information and the power relationship between
government and citizens. The authors explored three cases of LBS in Dutch public administration
and argue that LBS may affect the balance between the roles citizens can
have in their three relationships with government: (1) as subject of the state, (2) as client
of the state and (3) as citoyen (partner of the state). LBSs increase governments’
knowledge of whom is where at what moment, and the underlying technologies may
also influence the level of control of whom goes where at what moment. The authors
conclude that the right to privacy exists in public places where citizens can be monitored
and information about them collected. When interacting with citizens, government
should be aware of the conflicting values of the subject, citoyen and client role to avoid
extremes such as Big Brother scenarios.
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