About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

Recently I had an editorial forwarded to me from Environment and Planning B titled “Just another private public partnership? Possible constraints on scientific information in virtual map browsers”, authored by Francis Harvey of the University of Leicester (those with access can find the article here). Environment and Planning B is an academic journal focused on the science of solving spatial problems including GIS approaches. It also happens to be a journal where, as academics, we were fortunate to be published a few times. The editorial article claims that by embracing the GeoWeb, “Academics may forever lose the possibility to access and publish data without corporate consent. What Faustian bargain do we enter into when we use these amazing possibilities offered by virtual earth software?”

The great thing about blogging is you can provide a rebuttal to an article instantly and this piece definitely gave me plenty of cause to do so. Editorial pieces in academic journals are often meant to inspire discussion in the community and Dr. Harvey’s piece properly motivated me to respond. To be completely honest part of the motivation is the article specifically calls out GeoCommons as part of the corporate devilry that will steal away academics right to access data unfettered. As an academic that does sting a bit, but there are larger issues in the article that should be addressed.

First let’s hit the specific complaint. Dr. Harvey took a quote from the GeoCommons terms of use and highlighted it as something that would prevent academics from accessing data and result in a Faustian deal with us the FortiusOne Devil incarnate. The irony is that all the data in GeoCommons falls under a “Creative Commons with Attribution 3.0 license”. To quote the Creative Commons page, “This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.” This is the same license that Wikipedia and OpenStreetMaps use by way of example.

There is a clause in our terms of service covering the possibility of GeoCommons one day also having licensed data from a third party that would not fall under Creative Commons because it would need to reflect the terms of use from that third party – “Certain information and content may be provided by third party licensors”. This is the example that Dr. Harvey quotes from which is completely non sequitor and purely serves to validate a false argument. Dr Harvey states, “Generally we need to remember that, except for the use of these software applications and GIS data for personal use or within fair-use provisions, any use requires the permission of the software provider and possibly the data provider.” He then goes on to say that the “newly announced GeoCommons Terms of Service” have the following restrictions on use to validate his statement that you need permission to use any data in GeoCommons. This is blatantly false and a highly misleading construction on Dr. Harvey’s part.

Our terms of use clearly state that the data uploaded into GeoCommons falls under Creative Commons and you cannot grab the quote he did without reading that. Not to mention every data set on the site has posted under it the fact it falls under a Creative Commons license. I find it disingenuous to post a quote in a highly reputable journal stating we restrict the use of data and are denying open access of it to the public. That is the exact opposite of the mission we had in launching GeoCommons and the reason we chose the Creative Commons with attribution license (much to our lawyers chagrin), which has made over 2000 datasets with over 38,000 attributes available to the public.

Now that I have my personal rant out of the way I’d like to address the larger issue of what the GeoWeb means for data access in the academic community. There are issues to be addressed with making the public aware of licenses (although this should be done without an agenda and in an honest and holistic light) and issues with the alteration of imagery in virtual globe software (both of which are featured in the article as issues for academics). Although I firmly believe there is a faulty leap in logic connecting these issues with the access of data to academics and the public. It is highly sensationalist to take a string of out of context quotes and personal experiences and extrapolate that into such a grandiose statement. The article boils down to a series of blog posts and media reports about Google changing imagery on Google Earth. Somehow Google changing imagery and enforcing copyrights on licensed work magically becomes a grand conspiracy by corporations to prevent academics from accessing public data.

I’d argue the Geoweb has had the opposite effect – it has opened up and freed data so it is no longer only available to those with expensive GIS software like academics and GIS professionals. The advent of licensing regimes like Creative Commons has created the ability to share data and knowledge across the web. Projects like OpenStreetMaps have made prohibitively expensive street data available to the public. Wikipedia has created a growing repository of data available much of it geo-referenced. Services like GeoNames has created the free ability to geo-reference large amounts of unstructured data. I like to think we’ve added our bit by making more structured geospatial data available to those without access to GIS systems. I think the geography and GIS community would be much better served by directing their considerable energies toward the positive things that can be accomplished with these technologies and tools than creating Orwellian mythologies that do not hold up to a factual test.

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