GeodataGrantDraft

This a draft of a grant proposal to the AFFS scheme at http://www.affs.org.uk/grants/index.html 

what project is about / where we are at
We are a group of projects working on Open Source software to create and publish free-of-copyright maps of the UK. Any software should be re-usable worldwide. See http://okfn.org/geo/ for a list of projects, some of which have been running for years, others have recently started.

what we would spend the money on
We have several potential approaches for home map-making.
 * Extracting, or tracing features from commercially-available satellite photography which does not restrict creation of derivative works.
 * Extracting features from GPS tracks which have been collected and uploaded in GPX format.

Commercial satellite data is not cheap - around 12UKP for a square kilometre with a minimum buy for 50kmsq, where all tiles have to be adjacent. We have estimated about 1000UKP to cover a significant amount of London.

GPS units cost from 100USD. We would like to be able to run a "pool" of GPS hardware which could be given out short-term to enthusiast groups - particularly cycling clubs - for mapmaking projects.

how much money we would ask for / what our matching funds are
We have been offered matching funds of up to 400UKP from both WirelessLondon - http://wirelesslondon.info/ and the Open Knowledge Foundation - http://okfn.org/. We have a PayPal campaign which has received a little bit of cash.

We would like to be able to both buy a sample of satellite data to try auto-extraction techniques, and have a pool of GPS units to lend. With our budget we can't afford to do both.

Price of 10 GPS units + 5 data cables?

''Please describe to us how important this outcome would be to you or your users, and what probability of success you expect
We know that a GPS-based approach will slowly work, but be human-resource-intensive. We don't know what kind of results we will get from satellite data.

Free base maps, and potentially geocoding services, are needed by all sorts of different Open Source based civic information projects. The Ordnance Survey's pricing policy puts state-collected geographic data out of the reach of volunteer projects.

Sharing data sources and metadata between this network of projects, we hope to set informal standard processes for collaborative map creation, and produce software that will allow our approaches to be replicated worldwide, either in "developed" societies without open access to geodata, or "developing" places where a Spatial Data Infrastructure is unavailable.