It depends on whom you ask.

The All Points Blog posts about a recent round in the never-ending tug of war between digital data custodians and those who want free and unfettered access to the data. In a nutshell, Orange County Superior Court Judge James J. Di Cesare has declared that digital data is actually software, “and thus do not fall under the state public records law.” The ruling is being challenged by the Sierra Club.

New Jersey is no stranger to such challenges. In 2003 Robert Bradley Tombs filed an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request with the Brick Township Municipal Utilities Authority (BTMUA) for a digital copy of the MUA’s GIS data. The request was denied and litigation ensued.

Another thorny FOIA issue arises from the multitude of GIS data formats. OPRA prescribes that the data custodian must deliver the requested data in the format the data are in. Clear and sensible. However, it is further prescribed that if the data are requested in a different digital format and the request is easy to accommodate, the data should be converted to the requested format prior to delivery. An example given during the March 26, 2010 New Jersey Geospatial Forum (NJGF) general meeting: “If you keep your data in Excel and the requester asks for a CSV file, you must give them a CSV file.”

In my opinion this puts the issue on a slippery slope, and several NJGF members voiced a similar sentiment during the 3/26/2010 NJGF meeting. What if I keep my data in Oracle Spatial and the requester wants a shapefile? A coverage? A DWG? A DGN? A PDF? How far do I go to accommodate the request? When does “easy” cease to be easy? If only GIS data conversion issues were as simple as XLS – CSV.

The 59-page final report of the NJGF OPRA Task Force does not address the multiple digital data format issue. It contains two mentions of “format” (pages 15 and 58), both quoting the same paragraph (below):

“Whenever the nature, format, manner of collation, or volume of a government record embodied in the form of printed matter to be inspected, examined, or copied pursuant to this section is such that the record cannot be reproduced by ordinary document copying equipment in ordinary business size or involves an extraordinary expenditure of time and effort to accommodate the request, the public agency may charge, in addition to the actual cost of duplicating the record, a special service charge that shall be reasonable and shall be based upon the actual direct cost of providing the copy or copies …” (Emphasis added.) N.J.S.A. 47:1A-5.c.

Clearly GIS data and its myriads of formats present a challenge for data custodians and policy-makers alike. My interest in this issue is more civic than practical, since I neither make nor respond to OPRA requests. But I will further research the issue, for clarity’s sake, and will report here any new findings and developments.