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The inventor of the world wide web wants access to Ordnance Survey data – and the freedom to manipulate it as he sees fit

The inventor of the world wide web has called for more open access to Ordnance Survey (OS) mapping data – and may get his wish later this year. Sir Tim Berners-Lee told an Oxford University audience last week getting “basic, raw data from Ordnance Survey” online would help build the “semantic web”, which he defines as a web of data using standard formats so that relevant data can be found and processed by computers.

“There’s a moral argument that says, for a well-run country, we should know where we are, where things are, and that data should be available,” he said.

Berners-Lee said it may be reasonable for OS, the premier state-owned supplier of public sector information, to continue to charge for its high-resolution mapping. But even if licences were required, he added, OS should make its data open to manipulation. “I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data,” he said. “I want to be able to do Google Maps things to a ridiculous extent, and not limited in the way that Google Maps is.”

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