Geodata Licensing

This is a project started by the Public Geospatial Data Committee

The right to reuse and redistribute publically accessible bodies of data needs to be clear. This group can help provide guidelines for public geodata licensing, both of community-contributed and state-collected bodies of data.

Focus

• Provision of clear guidelines for licenses, and the implications of their uses, for people contributing data to geospatial web / GSDI efforts.
• Potential work on a draft LPGL license to complement the draft PGL.

Participants

• Jo Walsh
• Schuyler Erle
• Perry Nacionales (Jo and Schuyler need company :)
• Daniel FAIVRE
• Frank Biasi
• Chris Holmes
• Dave Sampson
• Puneet Kishor
• Lorenzo Becchi
• Brent Wood
• your name here

Existing and related projects

• Geodata Commons
• Open Knowledge Definition survey of open license stances, a superset of this effort.

Geodata Licenses

Public Geodata Licence

• original Public Geodata License (French/English)
  • PGL English translation (because PDFs are a pain to read)
• Group PGL-Canada (OLD. See Ottawa-OSGEO PGL)
• Ottawa-OSGEO PGL

Canadian Unrestricted Use Licence

• Geobase Unrestricted Use Licence Agreement - BSD style license
• same license at Natural Resources Canada

Creative Commons

• Creative Commons is not a data-specific license, but Open

References

• Public Geodata License - French version, and cooperative website for license writing
• OpenStreetmap Legal FAQ
• Public Commons of Geographic Data - Research and Development Challenges (PDF) - discusses IP issues
• Licensing Geographic Data and Services - book with some sample PDFs - cf Section 3, Chapter 9
• The Science Commons Data project - explores ways to assure broad access to scientific data

See Also

• Geodata Packaging Working Group
• Geodata Discovery Working Group