A structuring project
France was one of the pioneers in the world in defining a project opening its public data to all application or site developers. Almost 9 years before the United Kingdom, for example, France opened up its data as early as 2002, with regional examples such as Rennes and Paris. But the legal and technical organisation is costly and France devotes a small budget to this. Less than €4 million is spent compared to €25 million in the USA (in 2010). The licence to use this data must therefore be given special attention and the organization, which until now has been attached to the Prime Minister’s office, is now structuring itself to examine the conditions for using this data in greater detail and adapt the licensing methods.
There is no doubt that the applications sold in millions of copies on the mobile stores will be put to good use and will, in time, have to return a share of their revenue to the organizations that rely on their data… It’s time for the give and take.
What about cultural or scientific data ?
A lot of data exists within the local authorities. Once the problems of rights are overcome (there is often an author hiding behind the somewhat structured information), informations could quickly complete the scenarios of patrimonial discovery or encyclopaedic information repositories. The emergence of what is known as the “semantic web”, which allows information to be extracted by analyzing the content of texts, must participate in this movement. To be continued…