National Address Register project terminated

[Gavin Treadgold]

I wanted to share some extremely disappointing news that I received today. The National Address Register project has been terminated.

This project had the intention of providing a single national authoritative dataset for roads, addresses and placename information. The potential of this project was to deliver a free dataset that all organisations and individuals in New Zealand were free to use. This would have made a fantastic resource, and had the potential to consolidate a number of mapping projects, and could have greatly simplified the work associated with project such as the NZ Open GPS Maps project, as the NAR would have provided a single national focal point for feedback and correction of road and address information.

The cynic in me says that the reason this project failed was because of the commercial interests in existing roading datasets. Currently there are multiple roading datasets from different providers, and they are making very good money from these. Some roading datasets sell for six figure sums on an annual basis. Naturally, very few organisations can afford these prices, so only large Government agencies tend to be able to purchase them. Suffice to say, these datasets are different, and there is not a single authoritative dataset amongst them.

The NAR had the potential to create a single, free and authoritative road, address and placename dataset. Tenders were invited for the project, and there was going to be only one organisation to win the tender. As a result, all but one of the current commercial providers stood to lose their revenue streams from their roading datasets. As you will see in the notification below, the tenders were too expensive. I believe that it was in all the commercial vendors interests to put in high tender prices to ensure that the NAR did not go ahead, and that they could protect their existing revenue streams rather than risk missing the tender and losing it all.

The upshot of this is that my faith in the Government to provide geospatial information to its citizens is now close to zero. If they are not capable of producing a single authoritative roading dataset (arguably one of the most important sets of spatial information as it defines most of our physical connectivity) then there is little hope of them being able to deliver any useful spatial information to citizens.

As the NZ Open GPS Maps, Zenbu and NZ Open Street Map projects have shown us, a volunteer community can develop products faster and cheaper than commercial or government organisations, and over time they will have better quality as well.

I believe the time has come for us to build more volunteer communities to provide spatial information that our Government is failing to provide to us. No longer can we wait upon them, rather we must build it ourselves. There are four key areas that we need to focus on.

1. Raw data collection - taking our GPS units out into the real world and collecting and sharing data. Collecting track logs and uploading these to the OpenStreetMap or NZ Open GPS Maps projects. Providing waypoints to OSM and Zenbu. Please - if you haven't already, consider donating some time and information to these projects so that they have raw data to work with. This 'field survey' work is essential to creating our own spatial information resources. (I would particularly encourage geocachers to contribute their tracklogs if at all possible as we tend to travel a little more than others )

2. Mapping - converting the data collected in the field to information. Creating vectors for road lines, adding street name, directions, speeds. Using your local knowledge to map the community around you.

3. End products - converting the spatial information into a form suitable for others to use, for example the NZ Open GPS Maps project producing Garmin map files that can be loaded into GPS units.

4. Distribution - due to the large quantities of information involved, we may need to look at creating an ad-hoc network of individuals and websites to share the vast quantities of information about our country via torrents or similar P2P mechanism.

I believe the time has come for all those that want better access to spatial information to go out there and be a part of collecting, and building it. We can't wait for Government to build it for us, so we will have to do it ourselves.

Let's get started.

SUBJECT: NAR PROJECT TERMINATED

The National Address Register (NAR) project is a cross-government initiative set up to develop infrastructure to improve the provision of address, road and place name information for government agencies, businesses and the wider community.

The project is over-seen by a Steering Committee comprised of representatives of key stakeholders from central government, local government and emergency services agencies.

An integral part of developing a business model and business case for the National Address Register (NAR) was to assess whether there was a supplier able to provide the relevant services and to identify the likely costs. An RFP process was chosen as the most effective way of identifying both of these.

Following assessment of the tender proposals, the Steering Committee has decided to terminate the project. Despite the project showing considerable potential to reduce duplication across government and reduce costs, it is too expensive to proceed with in its current form.

Further investigation into the need for, and the most cost-effective way of providing address, road and place information, will be led by the New Zealand Geospatial Office, within their mandate under the NZ Geospatial Strategy. This work will include determining the optimal role for the Crown, local government and the private sector. Brendon Whiteman, Director New Zealand Geospatial Office - brendon....@linz.govt.nz; will be happy to answer any queries that you may have in relation to these activities in the context of the overall work programme of the Geospatial Office.

It is expected that agencies will continue with existing arrangements they have for the purchase of this location data, from the commercial sector.

Nancy McBeth of the State Services Commission, is preparing a Lessons Learnt report on the NAR project. If you have some views that you would like considered in that report, please contact her at nancy....@ssc.govt.nz by 31 May 2008.

On his return from Annual Leave next week, Laurence Millar, Chair of the NAR Steering Committee will formally write to your Chief Executive to advise of the decision.

Regards
Jill Barclay
Operational Owner NAR project
NZ Police

Received from a public email list I subscribe to.

Cheers Gav

PS Originally posted at http://forums.gps.org.nz/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4103

[Pete F]

Nah -its good news.

Admittedly, I haven't followed this closely because for me, it was
just another "stand back and watch the poor taxpayer get fleeced"
project.

But (so) I was pleased to see that announcment.

The way is now clear for something in between grassroots and money-
flushing-vendor-fest. This is not to say such a thing will happen -
but it could *not* have happened until the usual suspects were given
the opportunity to go straight.


pf

[Gavin Treadgold]

(resending from proper account)

I disagree. Whilst the NAR may have had a significant upfront cost, it had the potential to provide significant savings to the poor taxpayer and ratepayer. Now it will remain a taxpayer funded gravy train for the vendors.

Consider that there are 80+ local authorities, and plenty of Government ministeries/agencies that use this information. I'd argue that we are going to be fleeced more by the inherent inefficiencies in the current arrangement. Some Government agencies I am aware of are paying over half a million per annum for some of this data. It makes one wonder if Treasury have run the number on the current commercial vs collaborative approach?

But I do agree that it has now paved the way for us to forget about Government when it comes to spatial information and that the focus should be on doing it ourselves.

Cheers Gav

[Robert Coup]

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Gavin Treadgold <redi...@gmail.com> wrote:

The upshot of this is that my faith in the Government to provide geospatial information to its citizens is now close to zero. If they are not capable of producing a single authoritative roading dataset (arguably one of the most important sets of spatial information as it defines most of our physical connectivity) then there is little hope of them being able to deliver any useful spatial information to citizens.

IMHO thats stretching things a bit. Government doesn't move as fast as we'd all like, but I think many individuals at LINZ/NZGO are thinking open, and the tanker is slowly turning. Other govermental orgs might be a different story (see [1] for local govt ...  perspectives)

OSM has Topo and cadastral data available now from LINZ licensed, we just need to write some code to get it imported into the OSM formats and to update it with new releases. I'm happy to help out and offer advice but I don't have the time over the next month or two to dig into it.

And when we show what good things we're doing with LINZ data I think that'll inspire them somewhat to do it themselves.

My 2c,

Rob :)

[1] http://edcorkery.com/2008/04/27/council-staff-attitudes-towards-geodata-requests/