Hans-Jürgen Schwarz, GIW-Geschäftsstelle

WhereCamp 2015

27. November 2015, Berlin

Open GeoData

for commercial users –

a view on licenses and privacy

Who we are...The GeoBusiness Commission

• Installed 2004 by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs

and Energy as part of the national Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) of

Germany

• The office is located at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and

Natural Resources in Hannover

• Members are 24 umbrella organisations from different branches of

the German economy

How does spatial data find its way from providers to users?

• Bring together the different actors from politics, economy and

administration

• Initiate and learn from lead projects

• Set up taskforces to support standardization of data policies

• Studies focused on licensing and privacy

What we do...

You have a business idea with Geodata

You have to care about - among many other things

• Licenses

• Privacy

• Reliability of OpenData

Open Geodata for Commercial Users

Licenses and Geodata

Which License is attached to your data?

Does your dataset have a license for commercial

use?

Not always the case with geodata

Licenses of the GovData Portal Geography, Geology and basic spatial data (e.g. topo maps, DOP)

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23.11.2015

Open Data Principles*

1. Completeness

2. primacy

3. Timeliness

4. Ease of Physical and Electronic Access

5. Machine readability

6. Non-discrimination

7. Use of Commonly Owned Standards

8. Licensing

9. Permanence

10. Usage Costs

* Sunlight Foundation 2010, (Open Data Working Group 2007)

“All rights reserved” -- traditional Copyright

“Some rights reserved” the guiding principle of open content licenses

by enabling others to use, share and mix their work without the need to

ask in advance.

e.g. CC Licenses: automatic termination clause: any license violation

terminates the license automatically.

• Be diligent in selecting a particular license.

• Incompatibility problem (GNU FDL and CC BY-SA)

Open Content – Open Data

• OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database License.

• But: before 09/2012 CC-BY-SA 2.0

• The single objects of the database are licensed under the "Database

Contents License (DbCL) 1.0".

• OSM-Data, commercial use is allowed.

OpenStreetMap

Creative Commons

Open Data Commons

Datenlizenz Deutschland

GeoNutzV

GeoLizenz Open

Licences for Open Data

Geodata and Privacy

Why privacy is relevant

• Business models with high-resolution spatial data (eg,

high-resolution aerial images, risk areas, monument data,

cadastral data)

• personal data

• Damage impact for those affected

Data with privacy are usually not in Open Data portals.

Privacy - Solutions

Data protection for sensitive information receives appropriate

consideration:

when…

… there is a clear definition of the data that needs no restrictions,

… technical measures support the anonymization of sensitive data (e.g.

scale limitations, tilings, generalizations, ...)

… an examination of the legitimate interest takes place,

… a code of conduct / self-regulation is used to support the laws

Privacy - thresholds

It can be assumed that the legitimate interests of interested parties are

not affected if:

The data with a scale smaller than 1: 5,000 are represented (map

display)

The data are presented with a resolution, equal or greater than 20 cm

per pixel (e.g. satellite bzw.- aerial image information.)

The data are shown on a gridded surface equal or a larger than

100 x 100 m,

The data are presented aggregated across at least four households.

Privacy - thresholds

• Tiling 1x1 km with indexed signatures as preliminary information

• Parcel sharp information access only with a legitimate interest

GeoBusiness Code of Conduct (CoC)

Pledge „GeoBusiness and Privacy“ (CoC)

(Selbstverpflichtungserklärung)

• Use of data of public authorities by

private parties

• Voluntary participation by companies

• Privacy-compliant implementation of

business processes with sensitive

geospatial data

• Germany-wide uniform and harmonized

standard

• Simplifying recurring data collection

www.geodatenschutz.org

Contact

Dr. Hans-Jürgen Schwarz

Hans-Juegen.Schwarz@GeoBusiness.org

Website: www.geobusiness.org

twitter.com/GeoBusinessORG