Introduction to Neogeography

Licensing

We have talked a lot about data and mapping providers, but we only briefly touched upon things like terms of service. However, the issue is a very large and important one.

Geographic information such as POIs, maps, routes, and various other data constitute a huge market. There are many companies and clearinghouses that build their entire business on owning and controlling data. They also spend large amounts of money to gather, organize, and distribute this data.

In addition to commercial sources of data, users and neogeographers are constantly collecting and sharing data. Waypoints, hiking paths, photographs, and so on are media that have terms of use associated with it.

Without data, neogeography becomes rather empty. What is a map without any imagery or roads? It is important to understand and comply with the licensing terms that comes with data. Sites such as Flickr provide users with an easy mechanism for specifying if their photos are public/private and released under restrictive licenses, or Creative Commons licensing (http://creativecommons.org/). However, the distinction is not always so easy to make and understand.

The United States has a good history of sharing geographic data that is gathered by the government. The TIGER/Line data (http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/) (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system) is all of the census and street data gathered during the U.S. national census. The data is released under very open terms. However, ...