Smart watch tides

[lustyd]

There is an interesting difference between UK and USA - in US any data produced using public funds has to be made available freely. In UK we task the public bodies (UKHO, Crown Estates etc) with making as much money as possible. Really is a shame

That was my point, the EU passed a directive requiring the US model in member states. Thankfully we've been spared that kind of sense in the UK and will instead benefit from <insert upside here>

 

[bedouin]

That was my point, the EU passed a directive requiring the US model in member states. Thankfully we've been spared that kind of sense in the UK and will instead benefit from <insert upside here>

Lower taxes

I didn't know the EU had mandated that - do you know the name of the directive, I would be interested to see how they phrase it.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

There is an interesting difference between UK and USA - in US any data produced using public funds has to be made available freely. In UK we task the public bodies (UKHO, Crown Estates etc) with making as much money as possible. Really is a shame

It's actually ONLY the USA that has that policy. And it has a down side - if a product that will do a job is available FOC, no-one will pay for a better product at a commercially viable rate. It's something I saw all the time in my field; because a US Government body produced a product for its own purposes that could be made to work for other things, it wasn't commercially viable to produce products that were tailored to other needs. For example, for a long time (and maybe still) road networks in the USA were derived from something the Bureau of Census created to define census regions. It was fine for their purposes and worked as a road network maybe 95% of the time. But if you've ever used a US road map and discovered (for example) that a road that appears to join two places is interrupted by a stream bed and is impassable, that's why. That's a real example that I encountered in Redlands, the home of the premier GIS company worldwide! In the UK, if you want a road network, you buy it from the OS at a price that reflects it's value, and if you're a public body you stand a good chance of getting it free. And it will be good to well-specified standards of accuracy and completeness. You don't have to make do with a product that isn't what you need because no-one can compete with a bad but free product

 

[AntarcticPilot]

That was my point, the EU passed a directive requiring the US model in member states. Thankfully we've been spared that kind of sense in the UK and will instead benefit from <insert upside here>

I recall there being talk about it, about 15-20 years ago. I think it never happened, at least not in the US form. There is a requirement for environmental data to be freely available at cost of reproduction (i.e. free for downloadable data) but that doesn't cover derived data - it's the difference between tide-gauge data (freely available) and tidal constants (derived from tide-gauge data). My colleagues in the BGS were seriously worried as it would have destroyed about 90% of their funding!

 

[lustyd]

It did happen, and has been updated on several occasions. It's only a directive though, not a regulation. Still, it's more forward thinking than what we have where we're expected to pay to create the data and then buy it from the agency we funded!

 

[Ningaloo]

The raw tide gauge data are freely available from the National Oceanographic Data Centre. Anyone who wishes can compute tidal constants from them.

As far as the UK is concerned, it's not the computation for your own use that is the issue, however you cannot publish or distribute the results, reagardless of where you sourced the harmonic data (even if you measured it yourself) without paying UKHO a royalty. As has been stated, this may be less for short term predictions, but you still need a licence for this.

 

[bedouin]

It did happen, and has been updated on several occasions. It's only a directive though, not a regulation. Still, it's more forward thinking than what we have where we're expected to pay to create the data and then buy it from the agency we funded!

Can you given the name of the directive?

I don't really have an issue with the user paying a fair amount for the data - seems fairer than the general tax payer having to pay for information they don't use - but I don't like the requirement on many organisations to maximise the income.

 

[alahol2]

As far as the UK is concerned, it's not the computation for your own use that is the issue, however you cannot publish or distribute the results, reagardless of where you sourced the harmonic data (even if you measured it yourself) without paying UKHO a royalty.

I don't see how that can possibly be true. You need to quote a source for that statement otherwise it qualifies as false news.
.

 

[lustyd]

Can you given the name of the directive?

PSI to open data