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Making "Place Data" Free For All

Likely fueling the growth of location-based services, geo-location data storage and platform service SimpleGeo has put data for more than 20 million places into the public domain. "With this week's announcement, SimpleGeo is saying that the data for nearly 20 million places that it owns are now available, to use freely, under the Creative Commons Zero, or 'No Copyright,' license," reports ReadWriteWeb. "It is our belief that facts should be free, as in freedom," SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan wrote yesterday on the company's blog."We wanted to see the proliferation of places data that developers could easily use, reuse, or basically do whatever they wanted with."

Meanwhile, as Joe Francia, editor in chief of Directions Media, tells ReadWriteWeb, "'Free data' under CC0 shakes up the business model of those who for years have invested in collecting data under a proprietary (read expensive) model ... What remains to be seen is if their own sourced data can be maintained and updated in a timely manner. People want good data, regardless."

Read the whole story at ReadWriteWeb »

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