Is paying for managed open geospatial data worth it when the data is free?

In this case, ‘free’ is not the same as ‘has no cost’. Open geospatial data can be accessed without needing to pay a fee, so paying somebody to provide it instead can seem unnecessary. But the difference is that while accessing a dataset costs nothing; making hundreds of datasets consistently useful requires considerable time and resources.

For occasional requirements, going directly to the original publisher is an obvious choice. A GIS analyst can find the dataset, check its licence, download it and prepare it for the task at hand. But the calculation changes when open data gets embedded into a business, and becomes part of a regular operational analysis.

Useful datasets being published by different organisations may use different formats, coordinate systems, naming conventions and update schedules. URLs and download processes can change. New versions need to be identified and processed, while older copies need to be replaced – and that all takes time and effort. It’s true, none of those tasks is unusual for a GIS team. Collectively, though, they create an ongoing data-management workload.

That means the real comparison isn’t free data versus paid data. It’s managing open data yourself versus paying for that management to be done for you.

A managed service guarantees several advantages:

• Datasets are brought together in one place

• Data is curated and prepared for use

• Updates are managed centrally

• Users don’t need to monitor multiple publishers

• Consistent delivery makes data easier to incorporate into existing GIS workflows

Whether that represents good value depends on scale. If an organisation uses two open datasets twice a year, then the honest answer is – probably not. But if several teams are routinely relying on environmental, transport, geoscience, demographic and other open information, then the time spent sourcing and maintaining it becomes an expensive part of the true cost.

Idox Geospatial's theMapCloud takes that work out of the individual GIS team’s hands. It provides access to more than 300 curated UK open datasets through WMS, WMTS and WFS, using a single API key. For organisations using open data extensively, the value isn’t in paying for information that was previously free. It’s in paying to make that information easier to find, maintain and use.

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