Perhaps not all of Canada! I found this article serendipityously while reading an article about the prevalance of men getting manicures in the Congo! Go figure!
What is most interesting is that I had not read anything in the Canadian Press about this? Have you?
Cheers
Tracey
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TpL spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Technology site and thought you should see it.
To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Technology site, go to http://technology.guardian.co.uk
Canada proves itself to be genuine land of the free
Michael Cross
Thursday August 10 2006
The Guardian
Manitoba abounds in geography. The western Canadian province stretches from the shores of Hudson Bay to the North Dakota plains, taking in some of the world's largest freshwater lakes. Of interest, too, are the databases describing this natural wealth.
The government of Manitoba says it was the first in Canada to make all its publicly funded geospatial data freely available, without any licensing terms, to government, businesses and citizens. This is the policy that Technology Guardian's Free our Data campaign calls on the UK government to adopt.
Officials say that the Manitoba Land Initiative, adopted in 2000, is based on sound business sense. "Frankly, it just did not make good economic sense to try and sell data that the taxpayers already paid for, and it was costing us much more to try to sell data and manage distribution then we were making in revenue," says Harvey Pokrant, director of the information technology services branch in the provincial capital Winnipeg.
Under the initiative, geospatial data held by different provincial agencies is harmonised and made available to all comers through internet and intranet sites. This is a vivid contrast to the UK government approach, which encourages state bodies holding data to treat it as intellectual property and to charge for its use, even by other parts of government. Significantly, the Manitoba initiative includes the provincial property registry, a contrast to England where the land registry is a separate trading fund.
In theory, freeing data along the Manitoba model should make life easier for officials creating policies for environmental protection, managing natural resources and encouraging investment in the province. It should also encourage the private sector to create value-added products based on public data.
Pokrant says there is evidence that this is happening. "Since we liberated our data holdings and placed all our data on the web, we now have over 9,000 registered data users." The disadvantage of making data free in this way is that government has no immediate commercial incentive to keep its intellectual property up to date.
Officials in Winnipeg say the land initiative is a part of an ongoing process, not a fixed or final product. "GIS users and decision-makers will guide future evolvement of this tool based upon their business needs."
Could Britain follow suit? It is important to stress that Manitoba's geography could scarcely be more different - the province is three times the size of the UK, yet contains only 1 million people. This means that the workload of updating databases to include new buildings and other construction works is trivial compared with that faced by, say, Britain's Ordnance Survey.
However, Canada is held by UK policy makers as an exemplar in several areas of e-government. As debate intensifies over the UK's future policy on public sector information, the Manitoba Land Initiative deserves to attract much interest.
Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog: www.freeourdata.org.uk.
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I also read this article - http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1824083,00.html
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