Geographic data is the base layer of civic management in the Information Age. Geodata (or "geospatial information") describes where you can vote; who represents you at different levels of government; where your children are entitled to attend state-managed schools; where different urban and rural developments are allowed to happen; where water and energy infrastructure lives; where we are.
In the United States, geographic information collected by state agencies must be made available in the public domain for no more the cost of distribution (which, in these days of the Internet, is effectively free).
In Europe, a consortium of NationalMappingAgencies has designed a new piece of proposed legislation called the INSPIRE Directive. It aims to establish standards that government agencies must maintain to facilitate sharing of data between different member countries, especially in order to help predict and control environmental emergencies.
This seems like a great idea. So why is INSPIRE a problem for a lot of people?
INSPIRE mandates a policy of recovering the costs of collection of geographic data by granting intellectual property rights over data collected by the state on behalf of citizens, and imposing common licensing terms on geodata.
This will force a lot of local agencies to sell data to NationalMappingAgencies rather than give it away to citizens.
INSPIRE imposes technical standards, but doesn't say what they will be, or whether they will be appropriate to peoples needs.
The SpatialDataInfrastructure problem is fundamentally a technological one, and not a legislative one. The Open Geospatial Consortium is a big industry body consisting of software vendors, NationalMappingAgencies and large internet companies with interests in mapping including Google. Their standards are open and free, and a lot of traditionally closed GeographicInformationSystems software is coming to support them. Nothing in INSPIRE's implementing rules needs to cover more than what the OGC already does.
INSPIRE doesn't include many data sources that are important
... oceanographic data, street level data - reasons why not?
The INSPIRE drafting process was not transparent and did not consult many organisations which have a stake.
merge this with some of http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenGeoDataLetter
On January 23rd 2006, an altered draft of INSPIRE was approved by the Council of Europe to go to a second reading in the European Parliament - possibly as soon as February 14th 2006.