Open geospatial data, software and standards

The “open” movement, which promotes the use of open source licenses for data and software, started in fact in the early days of computing, when groups of scientists were sharing computers while developers were working on common source code [1]. While this movement, since then, has not always been popular, today, it has resulted in major initiatives, including The GNU Project and its licenses, [2], this not-for-profit organization created to raise awareness on and advocate for open source (OSI n.d.), and the Open Data Commons, which provides licenses under which popular projects like OpenStreetMap (OSM) operate. Today, governments from around the world and stakeholders from the business sector both participate to and promote open geospatial data, software and standards initiatives. Governments increasingly provide free access to various types of geospatial data, typically statistical data, land use and land cover data, topographic data, among others, as they realize its potential to foster economic, social and environmental opportunities. Furthermore, open standards like those of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are at the core of major infrastructures such as the European Union’s INSPIRE Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The spectrum of projects and activities that employ open geospatial data, software and standard is huge: from implementation of open standards for Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) like the GeoCENS and 52 North platforms, which enable the sharing of sensor data, to the thousands of research projects and applications based on OSM, possibilities seem unlimited. Concrete projects based on open geospatial data are now having significant and measurable impact on communities, economy, political life, environment, health, transportation, only to name a few areas. These concrete projects range from sharing data on police actions and