@Rob- openspaces doesn’t give you free data at all. There’s a fundamental difference between allowing you to create an api for data that they maintain control over, and allowing you to download that data for use in your own applications. The terms of use for openspaces are in fact pretty restricted- there’s a link to the faq in my post. That’s the same kind of confusion that makes people think that google give their data away as well. As far as I know, the only people that do give you access to their data are the openstreetmap crowd, but if there are others I’d love to hear about it!

Thanks for stopping by

Archaeogeek

You’ve obviously not been paying attention to the OS Beta that has been running for the last few months….

http://openspace.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/openspace/

The February 2008 report “Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds” (http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file45136.pdf), commissioned by the UK Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and HM Treasury, looked at the potential economic and social benefits of extending access to this kind of publicly held information and concluded that “in most cases, a marginal cost regime would be welfare improving- that is, the benefits to society of moving to a marginal cost regime outweighed the costs”. In this context, a marginal cost regime means selling particular categories of data at the cost of distribution i.e. effectively zero-cost in the case of digital OS data.

So, who reckons we’ll see free data from the OS any time soon?

OpenStreetMap are gaining huge amounts on making data available from more users inputing their content.