Kudos to the Ministry for the Environment–they’ve released the New Zealand Land Cover Database (LCDB) under a Creative Commons Attribution-SharealikeAttribution license. This is one of the first of many datasets we hope to see released from Government under reuse-friendly CC licenses. The State Services Commission is working on a paper on open government data, which hopefully will provide guidance on CC licenses to guide departments towards best practices and liberal terms.
Interesting points with the LCDB:
- dataset is downloadable from Koordinates and [added 20090706, NJT] on physical media fro TerraLink International.
- the home page for LCDB links to its uses, which helps MfE establish how useful the open data is and to whom.
- MfE provide contact email address and documentation for the database. This documentation is static, and there is no forum or other community–an opportunity for the future.
Naturally, the Open Data Catalogue now has an entry for LCDB.
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