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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Cost of GIS Data |
| Date: |
11/18/2002 09:38:50 PM |
| From: |
Robert Heitzman |
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>
>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.
First - it should be of no concern if anyone makes $1 or $1 million dollars
of the data.
The original cost of the data is moot if it had to be collected anyway. If
the taxpayer funded jurisdiction is gathering and publishing data not used
for government operations, but as something to sell, they are skating on
thin ice.
Parcel data is interesting and it has a long history and entrenched money
making interests. For years people have taken notebook in hand and headed
downtown to get comparitive sales information for apprasials. However,
besides keeping the old guard happy it is difficult to justify witholding
parcel GIS layers. There are some privacy issues but most of those don't
hold water as the data can be had by all with a bit of effort. All the
restrictions do is slow down the flow - maybe a good thing. Most likely the
insiders want to keep the data restricted to maintain its value.
>
>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.
Why? Certainly the city couldn't sell data to one user so they could become
a sole source. The next level of market restraint is to charge a high fee so
the barrier to entry is high. The next question is how low to you go? The
only practical solution appears to be to give it away. If you wanted to come
up with a plan to recover distribution costs it would be hard to do without
the ordering, shipping, payment processing and accounting costing more than
infrastructure required to give the data away. At that point it is a "make
work" project.
>
>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.
Murky waters if the data isn't available to the public for free. Sounds a
lot like the definition of a kickback or sweetheart deal.
>
>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.
I'm sure all the parties envolved are still in place and have received
several promotions since then.
>
>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.
Free is the only practical fee. I would guess the accounting burden alone is
higher than the cost of distributing the data over the Internet. May bother
other than to make work?
>
>But I agree with you, local governme
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