Scotland’s LiDAR goes Open Data
Following the lead of England and Wales, the Scottish LiDAR is now also open data. The implementation of such an open geospatial policy in the United Kingdom was spear-headed by the Environment Agency of England who started to make all of their LiDAR holdings available as open data.
In September 2015 they opened DTM and DSM raster derivatives down to 25 cm resolution and in March 2016 also the raw point clouds went online our compressed and open LAZ format (more info here) – all with the very permissible Open Government Licence v3. This treasure cove of geospatial data was collected by the Environment Agency Geomatics own survey aircraft mainly for flood mapping purposes.
The data that had been access restricted for the past 17 years of operation and was made open only after it was shown that restricting access in order to recover costs to finance future operations – a common argument for withholding tax-payer funded data – was nothing but an utter myth. This open data policy has resulted in an incredible re-use of the LiDAR and the Environment Agency has literally been propelled into the role of a “champion for open data” inspiring Wales (possibly the German states of North-Rhine Westfalia and Thuringia) and now also Scotland to open up their geospatial archives as well