Your Taxes at Work
This map shows air pollution around London, where dirtier air is red or yellow, and cleaner air is blue or green. Hopes that an interactive version could be put online have been dashed by Ordnance Survey.
After a year of negotiations, academic geographers have conceded defeat in their attempt to find a way to make a pioneering 3D representation of the capital, Virtual London, available to all comers via the Google Earth online map.
Followers of Technology Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign will have guessed the reason: Virtual London is partly derived from proprietary data owned by the government through its state-owned mapping agency, Ordnance Survey (OS). What makes the situation bizarre is that Virtual London’s development was funded by another arm of the government, the office of the mayor of London.
Virtual London, developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College, London, represents all of the capital’s boroughs in 3D, including 3m buildings. It was intended to help citizens visualise the impact of new developments and hazards such as air pollution and flooding. The mayor’s London Connects e-government programme has also sent copies of the model, running in Google Earth, to each of London’s 33 local councils.
Then the problem emerged. Virtual London contains spatial data derived from OS’s MasterMap, the definitive crown copyright database of Britain. Licences to use MasterMap data are a valuable income stream to OS, a trading fund required to earn a profit for the Treasury by selling products and data licences. There was no problem with London’s boroughs using the 3D model in-house, because, like virtually all government bodies, they have licences to use OS data. What they could not do was post Virtual London on websites for London’s citizens to use.