Just as the country was unfreezing itself from our unaccustomed lengthy period of snow and ice, Dave Harte, as part of his taking over the running of the hyperlocal blog in his local area, laid a challenge before Birmingham City Council to make freely available – in an easy importable and mashable format – the data of which roads the gritting wagons go down.

Sounds a bit dull when described like that, but the point of it being in a mashable format is that would allow other websites to easily import that data for their own use – to produce a map of the routes just for your own local area, or for the whole city. Dave’s point was that he had to do a whole bunch of unnecessary work in making a new map by drawing lines on Google Maps taking the text information on the council gritting routes pages, when surely since the council already has the mapping data from its own mapping systems, why can’t it just make that data available from source?

Which is a reasonable question, if you don’t know the answer! Actually, most councils (or at least the people within them who use or have other interests in the data themselves) would love to release this data – after all, as Dave points out, at its crudest it’s a way of enabling community volunteers to do useful things with it instead of the council having to do (and therefore pay for) it.

The sad fact is, much as councils would like to release this data, central government, in the form of its various quango agencies, won’t let them. The mapping data for the gritting routes is derived from mapping by the Ordnance Survey – ie, the mapping .kml (or whatever) files are generated by somebody clicking on an Ordnance Survey map in a piece of mapping software, which then makes that data subject to OS’s rather restrictive licensing conditions – meaning that if those councils were to release that data, they’d get sued by the OS. No ‘might get told off’, most definitely will get sued – when it comes to protecting their intellectual property, the OS make Disney look cuddly. And sadly, over 90% of local government geodata (especially the interesting stuff) is compiled in this way – not by council workers walking around with handheld gps devices doing their own survey.

“But wait!”, I hear you shout, “OS are due to make their mapping free from April 2010!”

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that – OS are indeed making the maps free, but any data which is derived from those maps (ie, by somebody clicking on it) will still be restricted.

So the target for ire about the inability of local activists to easily produce a map of, say, local lollipop operatives – aka School Crossing Patrols – should be central government, not your local council.

You’d think, though, that with the launch of www.data.gov.uk – central government’s new open data repository – we’d be seeing the Dawn of a New Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity, with the possibility that this extra data will be in the second wave to be freed?

However, it looks unlikely, with the announcement that the petition to free the Royal Mail’s postcode data, which a number of interesting online applications were using until the Royal Mail threatened to sue them, has been rejected.

Don’t forget, all this data which the government continues to prevent us from using in our own applications, we have already paid for. We have a moral right to it. In the USA, not usually known for its free, open, and uncommercial attitude to things, absolutely anything which is created by a government employee is free for others to use, on that very basis that the taxpayer has already paid for it.