Brussels, 28 June 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

On June 28th the PSI Alliance annual conference took place. The PSI Alliance is a trade association established in order to encourage the public sector to maintain a trading environment that is fair and equitable, in particular in relation to the licensing and re-use of public sector information (PSI), and its members are companies and associations representing groups of companies.

During the conference the Five Star Award was given to the Instituto Geografico Nacional in Spain.

The five stars in this award stand for:

• information on the website about assets and prices for re-use
• a person/unit responsible for contact with re-users and a process for dealing with complaints
• solutions for deliveries of raw data (not value added data) to the re-users
• no unreasonable intellectual property rights restrictions connected to the information
• pricing based upon marginal costs

The Instituto Geografico Nacional matched and excelled the 5 Star criteria set for the provision of public data by a local authority.

In particular, the National Geographic Institute received the award for the excellent work regarding the development and promotion of a spatial data portal, its commitment and effort on cross-border projects of homogenization and standardization of data, its leadership shown and involvement in the “Eurogeocloud” project and finally the National Geographic Institute’s exponentially growing momentum in opening data.

Rolf Nordqvist, Chairman of the PSI Alliance said “I am very happy to award the PSI Alliance 5 Star award to the National Geographic Institute – it is a very worthy winner” “The National Geographic Institute provides an excellent service to citizens and businesses alike – it has made its data both available and accessible.”

Sebastian Mas Mayoral, Director of the National Center of Geographic Information, who attended the conference to receive the award showed himself pleased with the recognition:

“It is an honour to win the PSI Alliance 5 Star award. The National Geographic Institute has worked hard to put as much public information online as possible as well as being easy to navigate” “We are very pleased that our efforts are helping businesses and citizens to use and innovate with this valuable data.”