Access To Data and Criticisms
See also: Open Data in the UKAs with the Ordnance Survey for land mapping, the Hydrographic Office possesses a government monopoly on data for nautical charts and publications in the UK, while, although a part of the Ministry of Defence, also acts as a Trading Agency or commercial entity. This means that it is supposed to be totally self-funding from the commercial sale of its data and derived products - whilst at the same time it is supposed to be the public supplier of information. In 2010/11 it made a profit of almost £22 million from its commercial activities. These issues are very different to those of the Ordnance Survey where data is gathered at public expense. The UKHO sources much of its information from foreign governments to whom it pays a royalty fee and thus is no burden on the UK taxpayer.
The UKHO has a complex set of licences, according to the use of the product and its value. Whilst it generally allows use for non-navigational purposes at little or no cost, where licencing is for use in a navigational product (which can obviously compete with its core commercial activities), a higher licence fee is charged. Furthermore there are some data sets that it uses in its own products that it refuses to make available to other organisations.
In the Information Fair Trader Scheme Report on the UKHO in April 2011 it states that the UKHO data will not be included in the Public Data Corporation to make government owned data more freely available (part 3, item 29), but it does recommend that the UKHO implements a "Free Navigational Licence" (part 3, item 37).
Read more about this topic: United Kingdom Hydrographic Office
Famous quotes containing the words access to, access, data and/or criticisms:
“The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.”
—Steven Levy, U.S. writer. Hackers, ch. 2, “The Hacker Ethic,” pp. 27-33, Anchor Press, Doubleday (1984)
“A girl must allow others to share the responsibility for care, thus enabling others to care for her. She must learn how to care in ways appropriate to her age, her desires, and her needs; she then acts with authenticity. She must be allowed the freedom not to care; she then has access to a wide range of feelings and is able to care more fully.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)