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D.R. Green and S.T. Ray
COPYRIGHT
Copyright varies, with some of the official organisations who are potential suppliers of
data, being more restrictive than others. Where project funds are limited then the cost of
buying data and then paying royalties may be too great to justify their use, even though
they might be considered vital to the application.
LICENCE
Licence agreements may have to be signed for essential data, e.g. geological and related
bathymetric data in this project. The conditions attached, although strict, were
reasonable in this case and applied to a term of three years, the data being restricted to
the Moray Firth Project.
COSTS
Only one licence had to be paid for in this project but due to convenience (in suitable
digital form) and the importance to the project, finance in this case was provided for its
acquisition. Some important datasets (e.g. for meteorological data and topographic
data) would have been quite costly but these were not regarded as essential for the
current stage of this GIS pilot application.
GIS COMPETITION
GIS is increasingly becoming part of the work environment of many organisations.
Some have a directive to set up a system whilst others are still involved in digitising
data with a view to using it 'in-house'. For this and other reasons they are reluctant to
pass it on for use within other projects. Of the organisations contacted for this project at
least five were creating datasets with a view to setting up GIS for coastal and marine
purposes.
Datasets
STANDARDS
Very few of the datasets provided by organisations had any sort of standard attached to
them. This had some important repercussions on the possibilities open to the reporting
of potential errors and on significance in the decision-making process. The more
datasets that are collected to a common standard the higher will be the likely quality
especially for use in analyses.
MULTIPLE USERS
The final GIS database, once in working order, may have to enable multiple users, all
using the same data. Most GIS can enable this at the present time. However, this
D.R. Green and S.T. Ray
COPYRIGHT
Copyright varies, with some of the official organisations who are potential suppliers of
data, being more restrictive than others. Where project funds are limited then the cost of
buying data and then paying royalties may be too great to justify their use, even though
they might be considered vital to the application.
LICENCE
Licence agreements may have to be signed for essential data, e.g. geological and related
bathymetric data in this project. The conditions attached, although strict, were
reasonable in this case and applied to a term of three years, the data being restricted to
the Moray Firth Project.
COSTS
Only one licence had to be paid for in this project but due to convenience (in suitable
digital form) and the importance to the project, finance in this case was provided for its
acquisition. Some important datasets (e.g. for meteorological data and topographic
data) would have been quite costly but these were not regarded as essential for the
current stage of this GIS pilot application.
GIS COMPETITION
GIS is increasingly becoming part of the work environment of many organisations.
Some have a directive to set up a system whilst others are still involved in digitising
data with a view to using it 'in-house'. For this and other reasons they are reluctant to
pass it on for use within other projects. Of the organisations contacted for this project at
least five were creating datasets with a view to setting up GIS for coastal and marine
purposes.
Datasets
STANDARDS
Very few of the datasets provided by organisations had any sort of standard attached to
them. This had some important repercussions on the possibilities open to the reporting
of potential errors and on significance in the decision-making process. The more
datasets that are collected to a common standard the higher will be the likely quality
especially for use in analyses.
MULTIPLE USERS
The final GIS database, once in working order, may have to enable multiple users, all
using the same data. Most GIS can enable this at the present time. However, this