OPSI LF September report

OPSI publishes minutes of September 2009 Licensing Forum meeting

London: 30 October 2009

The UK Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) has published the minutes of the Licensing Forum meeting that took place on the 21 September 2009 at the Environment Agency.

The main topics considered at the forum meeting included:

Taking a Copyright Infringement Through the Courts, presented by Tony Dent – UK Hydrographic Office

The presentation described how the UK Hydrographic Office is dealing with an infringement of copyright. The case has been running since 2002 and involves companies in Malta, Germany and Guatemala. An appeal will be held in Malta in 2010.

Non-transactional licensing, presented by Beth Brook – OPSI

The presentation described that as of 1 January 2010, OPSI would no longer be charging for Crown copyright it licensed directly. As a consequence public sector bodies that licensed Crown copyright under a delegation of authority were not affected. A new licence would be brought into effect, which would be more flexible than the previous licences.

• The terms were open for consultation on OPSI Perspectives blog.
• The licence would not require application but would be a set of published terms and conditions
• The licence would utilise the emerging RDFa standard and Creative Commons technical vocabulary so as to achieve machine as well as human readability.

Data.gov.uk / Making Public Data Public, presented by John Sheridan – OPSI

The presentation described the new opportunity for a web of data to complement the current web of documents that had recently opened many new possibilities for new types of information services and applications. The web of data, known as the semantic web, has been designed to be machine-readable. Machine-readable formats define the content of data, and services associated with it, in ways, which enable automatic and intelligent processing by computers. Publishing information in this format would achieve three goals, through wider, cheaper and more efficient access to & re-use of public information:

• Providing a boost to the economy.
• Increasing government transparency.
• Enabling and adding impetus to public services reform.

Achievement of these goals is particularly enabled by some of the characteristics of Linked Data:

• Use of web standard for publishing information enables far greater like-for-like comparisons: boosting transparency and making development of new products and services more efficient – by orders of magnitude.
• Linked Data architecture provides very significant benefits in terms of version control, up-to-dateness, and reduced duplication.
• Linked Data enables users to establish relationships between disparate data far more quickly and easily than would otherwise be the case – as the relationships between data are formalised. This enables innovative combinations to be made with other sources and thus new intelligence obtained. An efficiency, which also delivers in terms of public services reform & transparency.
• Decentralised nature of a Linked Data web enables Departments & other public sector organisations to take ownership of their data publishing.

Environment Agency Licensing Policy, presented by Miles Gabriel – Environment Agency

The presentation included a description of the Environment Agency information consumers, which could be seen as pyramid shaped, with basic access to the Environment Agency information numbering in the millions, through local re-use of for particular projects e.g. flood risk assessments (many thousands of licensees), to large scale national re-use of Environment Agency data (around 35 licensees).

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