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July 28, 2008
Ordnance Survey Ontologies: Accidental Trojan Horse
As a Semantic Web wonk with a strong interest in geospatial issues, I was pleased to discover the Ordnance Survey's ontologies, which appear to be beautifully detailed. Until now, the OS have been little but the enemy of geospatial hackers in the UK, so it came as a surprise to me that they'd made a public-spirited effort like this.
Then I saw the license statement.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
And right there at the top of each ontology's source code is the line
<dc:rights>Crown Copyright 2008</dc:rights>
The license confirms my misgivings about the Ordnance Survey, in spades. Why? Because non-commercial licenses are not free. By using the OS vocabularies, you taint all your data. It is no longer open data (part of the wider field of open knowledge). And if someone uses it, thinking that it is, in a commercial project, they open themselves up to attack from the Ordnance Survey's lawyers (who have proven themselves time and again to be unsympathetic, confused or worse).
What a pity. Clearly a lot of work has been put into the project, but as currently licensed, these ontologies are data plague. Keep your information well away.
Posted by Earle Martin at 2:18 AM in: Ordnance Survey, Semantic Web, data, freedom, licenses, maps