Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 7, Names and Places

#78 What to Do if Your Government Is Hoarding Geographic Data

HACK

At http://www.ec-gis.org/inspire/ are a series of enlightening documents

assessing the “state of play” in GIS infrastructure in the then 15 EU and 10

accession countries. Included are URLs and contact details for the individ-

ual national mapping agencies. Most are part-government, part-privately

funded and are under pressure to “pay for” the costs of their activities, even

though many of the licensing fees are “false profits,” coming from other

branches of publicly funded activity, such as local government, environmen-

tal monitoring, and city planning.

If you’re in India. The Geological Survey of India (http://www.gsi.gov.in/

aboutgsi.htm) was founded in 1851. They publish hardcopy maps, carry out

geological surveys, and have digitization of their databases at hand. Their

Web presence is a bit scattershot, but there must be an amazing amount of

potential data and depth in there. There is currently no available geodata or

digital mapping provided by the Indian national mapping agency. It seems

ironic that the UK’s Ordnance Survey now outsources its digital map draw-

ing to Delhi.

If you’re in Japan. Oddly for a country so renowned for its obsession with

mobile devices, their mapping agency (http://www.gsi.go.jp/) seems very old-

fashioned. However, the Japanese mapping agency is working hard to orga- ...