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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Cost of GIS Data |
| Date: |
11/18/2002 04:32:04 PM |
| From: |
David Nealey |
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Robert,
There are several reasons why a municipal government agency should be
concerned with a private business reselling data at a profit. The first of
which is the cost of the original data to the agency. Depending upon the
source, an agency will pay anywhere from $4 to $10 per parcel for property
data, which is one of the most useful pieces of information to many users.
If a GIS firm can acquire those data for free and sell them for $1 a parcel
then the taxpayer has just given that firm a $50K, $100K, $500K freebie
depending upon the number of parcels sold to a client. So I would say yes,
private firms should not be able to walk into the courthouse and download
all the parcels data from the county/city's database.
Probably the second most important data layer would be streets. I don't
know the cost of converting a mile of streets into digital format but it
probably much less than the cost of parcels conversion. But maintaining
streets data has a cost and municipal government should be able to charge
for them and a firm should not be able to resell the data without
compensation to the agency.
Now there are ways that a firm can compensate a government agency. First
they can provide value add. By improving government-provided and giving all
the data back to the agency at no cost. In some cases, firms have offered
to do this and the agency has refused. But some types of data cannot be
enhanced by an outside firm because the information needed to do so is
acquired by the agency itself, e.g. parcels data.
I have even heard of agencies buying their own data. One department may
have converted the data and then gave them away or sold them to a firm that
then sold them to another department. Well that should be illegal. At most
the firm should only charge for time spent enhancing the data. Most of
these cases probably occurred before metadata was "invented", at least I
hope so.
IMHO government agencies around the world but especially in the US need to
establish a reasonable fee schedule for geospatial data. I would suggest
that the fee be based on a percentage cost of conversion and maintenance.
Perhaps 1 to 5 percent of the total cost. Exceptions should be made for
colleges and universities that should get subsets of any government's data
for free and all of the local data for free. Similarly, a person should be
able to get free data for personal use. If a person is doing research or
teaching a class in GIS they should not be charged for data that will be
used once or twice and then thrown away (archived onto CD/DVD). But if data
are obtained in this manner and then sold, the person should have to pay the
commercial price plus a penalty. However, if the person/firm pays the
commercial fee before the sale then that should be OK.
But I agree with you, local governments should not sell other agency's data.
If an agency has geologic map data from the USGS for example covering the
city/county then presumably they were acquired for an in-house project.
Perhaps they were reprojected into the same coordinate system and datum but
the project needed to do that work just to use the data and the cost should
not be passed onto the next user or the public.
There are standard elevation data and then there are special types of
high-resolution elevation such as LIDAR-generated and IFSAR-generated DEMs.
The former should be sold on a percentage of the cost to acquire, towards
the low end of the scale, like 1%. The high-resolution data should be sold
at a higher percentage, perhaps 5% but in accordance with the contract with
the aerial firm that acquired the data.
So in summary I would say that geospatial data should be free to some users,
inexpensive to most users, and at market rate to resellers who give nothing
back in return. But don't put the latter out of business or prevent them
from making a living. A sliding scale makes sense to me. Make data as
inexpensive as you can so that more people will use them for the good of the
taxpayer.
David
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Heitzman" <rheitzman@hotmail.com>
To: <Julia.Harrell@ncmail.net>: <gislist@geocomm.com>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 2:07 PM
Subject: RE: GISList: Cost of GIS Data
>
> >
> > >> I've found in my dealings with beurocrats and their GIS data,
> > >> they are really hesitant to give it to anyone in the private sector.
> > >> I hazard to guess it's becasue they don't want anyone to find their
> > >> mistakes and try to hold them accountable.
> >
> >No, the reason for not GIVING it to private sector for free is because
> >many of them will turn around and try to resell it at a profit.
>
> Very anti-capitalist of you. Is there some kind of unpardonable sin in
> offering public domain data for sale? If so most GIS data vendors are
going
> to some very unc
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