Several months ago I filled out a survey conducted by
several Canadian GIS professionals. These guys are all
concerned with the current government policies that exist in
order to recover costs associated with the production of
public GIS datasets. Myself, having worked in the private
sector in GIS consulting for several years, realize how the
cost of base data can seriously impact the approach that one
is going to take in setting up a digital base to support a
GIS project. In Canada it is very common for GIS projects to
be based on inferior or subordinate (cheaper) base data due
to the seemingly expensive costs associated with purchasing
digital data from governments. True, if you really look
around hard you can find some 1:250,000 data that is freely
downloadable, however, when was the last time you worked on
a local or regional project that used data at this small
scale?

The Canadian Free Geospatial Data Committee was established
to address concerns regarding this issue. For anyone having
interest in this subject I recommend you check out their
website at http://www.members.home.net/freedata/
While your there, spend a minute and fill out their survey
and look at the excellent compilation of resources that
relate to this topic at
http://www.members.home.net/freedata/datachrg.htm

In addition, I was recently interview for an article in
ComputerWorld magazine titled "Mapping the IT future through
the past". The article is essentially in introduction to GIS
for mainstream users and business world, however, as it was
done in Canada, the issue of data cost recovery seemed
to come up often.

http://www.lti.on.ca/front/search/front_Wtemplate.cfm?filename
=/cw/archive/cw14-17/c1417n7.htm

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