Open data : the approach in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany
Riecken, Jens
In the early days of the GDI NRW the goal was defined to stimulate the spatial information market which was estimated to be only at 15 % of its potential. At that time the use of services in applications outside of the classic spatial information sector was not developed at all. This was one of the reasons to start projects to show the benefit of SDI-services. As the major provider of reference data the Surveying and Mapping administration of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) was launching an open data portal in 2004 - called TIM-onlinee (Topographic Information Management online, www.tim-online.nrw.de) which provided all available reference data free of charge for viewing and non commercial use. In the last 7 years this portal was extended several times. Today practical experiences are available in this approach for open data. After more than 10 years still the easy and free of charge access to spatial data is the bottleneck in the development of the spatial information market. Applications like google maps, open street map and several others have overcome this bottleneck by establishing other business models. As a result the topic of open data is on the agenda of the public data agencies. In North-Rhine Westphalia an approach for open data is currently in the discussion which wants to enable the commercial, non-commercial, internal and external use of spatial information. The central idea is to look at the content and the format (raster or vector) of the data and to define open data products. Results of the discussion are expected in 2012.
Event: FIG Working Week 2012 : Territory, environment, and cultural heritage
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