Natural England makes GI datasets available under Open Government Licence

18 Apr 2012 01:12 PM

From 1 April 2012 Natural England has made its publically available Geographic Information datasets available under the Open Government Licence.

This means that datasets about areas of significance for the natural environment such as our protected site boundaries, habitat inventories, open access land and scheme agreements are now made available under a perpetual licence for commercial and non-commercial reuse.

The Open Government Licence is designed to allow anyone - businesses, individuals, charities and community groups - to re-use public sector information without having to pay or get specific permission. It is designed to ensure everyone benefits from government information published under the UK Government’s transparency agenda.

We are now able to use the licence, as we’ve secured copyright exemptions from Ordnance Survey under the Public Sector Mapping Agreement. Details of our datasets and the licence are available here.

This change means that our datasets can be used in services such as Google Earth and in your own websites, services and applications without restrictions so long as data isn’t used in a misleading way and that you make a link to the licence on our website.

We would welcome feedback and thoughts on how this will change the way our data can be used.