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Town Fights FOI Request for GIS Data and Images
dweyerma writes "The state's highest court will now decide a landmark public records case involving access to aerial reconnaissance photographs and maps of Greenwich, CT. The town maintains the images in a tightly kept database known as a geographic information system, which a judge declared to be public records last December. The Connecticut Supreme Court announced Monday that it will hear the town's appeal of that ruling, expediting the case by leap-frogging the state Appellate Court. The move virtually coincides with the third anniversary of the initial complaint in the case, which Greenwich resident and computer consultant Stephen Whitaker filed with the state Freedom Information Commission after the town denied his request for an electronic copy of the entire database for security and privacy reasons."
It's always been a thorn in my side, that (here in Canada, and no doubt elswhere) tax money pays for government agencies to collect map and aerial photography data (and land records), and do not make it properly accessible to the public.
Prior to the internet, you could buy the maps and aerial photographs for a fee, which was a bit high, I always thought, but reasonable considering the trouble and costs associated with the physical reproduction of the media.
Now in this age of the Internet and blank DVD's priced well under $1 (even our lame Cdn $), providing that "public data" far more cheaply (and allowing copying) should be allowed.
Instead the fees for getting large sets of map data are exorbitant. I just hope that more competitive privatized satellite photography concerns can provide a lot of this, far more economically.
This is especially annoying, since here in Canada, we are taxed quite heavily; if you make more than $50K Cdn [30K+-ish US], your incremental tax rate is something like 50c on the dollar. Plus in some provinces, you pay 15% GST on everything you purchase; booze and gas have taxes that are astronomical (more than 100%, I believe). (Not that we Canadians drink a lot, *cough* *cough*.)
In many cases, those tax dollars are put to great use, incredible and accessible health care (as much as we like to bitch about it, it's great), generally excellent and free highways (toll roads are fairly rare in Canada), and so forth. Granted, those are more critical than map data, but I still hope we come around on the mapping issue some day.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
First, we pay public servants to CREATE data,
then we have to pay them to USE it!
USA seemed to be better at this than we are.
Basing the argument on the government having paid for the collection is a iffy at best. The basis should rather be based on maximizing the public good,which is, in the general case, harder to figure out. One has to weigh: privacy concerns vs. defence (against Terrorists domestic and foreign) vs. public benefit. The answer will come out different depending on what the data is, what technology is in place/reasonable, and how much the organisation is willing to spend to make the information public. How soon to make it public is also going to have a big effect on how much it costs. folks on the internet want information upto the second.
You have a chemical spill in Seattle. You have a real-time information system for exchange among first responders who are doing their work. It hits the news and their site gets slashdotted. It's a dynamically built site, so caching by google is of no use whatever. The firemen and coast guard can no longer get information from aerial reconnaisance being done by a Canadian survey plane that happenned to be available. So they don't know where in the harbour the spill has gotten to.
Wall it off? OK, you need a separate network accessible by city, province, state, and many branches of two national governments, as well transportation (railways, airlines) in the area, and any specialized contractors that might be called in. And it has to be setup ahead of time, and managed and funded so that it is up when a crisis happens.
What is the cost of making that site public? Does the public need to know where there is a chemical spill? Of course they do! Should they get same information the government does on their first responder systems? Would be nice, but if the architecture/technology in place cannot answering that sort of demand, what do you do? Most people would accept as reasonable that you have a first responder system that is only available to a few, then have other systems which are used for public dissemination (aka. press conferences, other web sites, etc...)
Has he offered to purchase the information, or is he expecting to kick start his business with free information paid for by the city?
This doesn't seem to be about payment. Read the article again. The town has claimed that the materials' release presented an immediate danger to the community.
I work for a county that gets lots of requests like this. The county spends a lot of tax dollars to hire consultants to do the flights and correct the data.
We make the photos available on the web via a GIS application, so anyone can use it for casual purposes.
Usually when we get a request for the entire collection of photos, it is from a commercial outfit. They are usually NOT located within the county, so they haven't paid any tax dollars directly to the county. If we give this data out, it is a HUGE cost savings to the commercial outfit that would normally have to pay to have a flight done.
Wouldn't you want your local unit of government to help keep taxes down by raising additional revenues by selling this data?
now we are at around 75 US cents. so it has gone up about 18%. thirty years ago, as any beer drinking Canadian (closest analogy to "red-blooded American" I could think of
as for making goods cheaper... hmm... if they are natural resources, those are all costed in US$ anyways, makes no difference. if it manufactured goods, then most foreign components are going to be purchased in US$. so won't make much difference
either.
xchange rates are just trade friction. when rates change, prices slowly adjust to reflect the new cost structure. There is not really a long term benefit. the argument would make sense if high value items were manufactured directly from Canadian natural resources. I don't think that is too common a case.
my guess is that costs in Canada are lower because
there is a public health care system, which controls costs better than the american system, and many other sorts of organizations, like workman's compensation which reduce liabilities, so that insurance costs are lower across the board. The un-employment insurance programs reduce social diparity and unrest, and make the country cheaper to police, again reducing costs. That corporations use the same programs to smooth over low-demand periods by having workers on those programs then, and available when demand picks up.
So they don't have to spend as much on hiring, since the skilled people remain in the industry through the dips. Again, this reduces costs for industry.
Government created data can't be copyrighted. Of course, there's a huge loophole--the Federal government, for example, can hold copyright if the copyright is "donated." Of course, the government pays a contractor to create a big database, then asks the contractor to "donate" the database to the government. Not as bad as the UK, though, where the laws are subject to "Crown Copyright."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
in what the Russians considered a broken promise to open a second front as soon as possible. ...As soon as possible from the British-American prescective was as soon as the Germans and Soviet Russians had finished killing off as many of each other as possible.
The whole point of the second world war was to remove possible competition from Anglo-Saxon hegemony over the British Empire. To the extent that the Germans and Russians destroyed each other while Americans watched (until early 1942), that strategy worked. After the war, the British Empire fell apart as each part of it became more technologically advanced.
The cold war was a means of driving the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, which eventually worked. The fact that the Soviets were the most brutal and repressive government in the world, with 10,000,000 randomly-selected people in slave-labor gulag concentration camps, didn't help their cause either.
I work for Layton City in Utah, and we are preparing to release an interactive GIS database viewer client sometime in the next month.
The hardest part has been determining what data should be available to the public. Release of some of the data is controlled under a Utah state law called GRAMA, which stands for the Government Records Access and Management Act. It tells us what information about our citizens we are able to release, and why. Property ownership information, detailed floorplans, etc., could all be considered protected under GRAMA if read correctly.
To start with, we're going to be releasing a limited version of our "center line" file. The "center line" file is essentially a file of imaginary lines running down the center of a map. That file has addressing information, so we can use it for address location and pathfinding, but the full version of the file also includes police patrol areas, emergency response information, and lots of other easily abused information as associated metadata with each polyline.
One other issue here is space. Layton is a relatively small town, bound to the north and south by cities, to the east by a mountain, and to the west by the Great Salt Lake and another city. Even with that, our full GIS database (if exported to shape files) is several hundred gigabytes.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Last week I called our town's Health Dep't. to ask to see records of permits for water-wells and septic-systems on 14 properties from the last 3 years.
At first they tried to brush me off by saying I needed to file an FOIA request.
In this case it wasn't security, merely civil-service laziness.