[GSDI Legal Econ] new report on legal aspects relaing to geospatial respositories

[Kate Lance]

Are databases covered under copyright or database right?
 
The GRADE project (Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction, http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/), run by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh has been investigating the technical and cultural issues around the reuse of geospatial data in learning, teaching and research environments of UK academia.  The project has just completed a legal report on copyright and the database directive.  It can be accessed at: 
 
http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/gradeDigitalRightsIssues.pdf
Designing a licensing strategy for sharing and re-use of geospatial data in the academic sector
by Charlotte Waelde Co-Director of the AHRC Research Centre into Studies on Intellectual Property and Technology Law
 
See also the blog by Mike Smith at Kingston Centre of GIS -- Copyright or database right... Does it matter?
http://www.journalofmaps.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/GIS/GRADE_Waelde.html
 
GRADE also made live a new version of the GRADE geospatial repository demonstrator (which has a map-based geospatial search function and GIS file verification stage in the submit stages): http://gradedemo.edina.ac.uk/dspace/index.jsp
 
As the project comes to a close in its current form, they are inviting feedback (in general about the ethos of the project and what they are trying to achieve, as well as about the functions and user-interface of the GRADE repository) -- see User Survey at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/survey2.html

The results of the Informal geospatial data-sharing questionnaire are worth a look - some interim results were summarized in a October 2006 presentation: 
http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/meetings/301006.html
http://edina.ac.uk/projects/grade/ppt/Survey_results_allpartner_oct06.ppt
(e.g., despite the many efforts in metadata creation and search tools, manual access (on CDs) and email are still the most common ways people find geospatial data; main barrier to geospatial data-sharing is confusion over rights and permissions).

Regards,

Kate


 
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