The Norwegian Ministry of Education has arranged free access to nearly all data in the NSDI. The ministry has an agreement with Norway Digital parties concerning use of public spatial data. There is an interest in using spatial data as a way of developing digital skills and encouraging the use of spatial data as a source of information for both education and research. These access rights are extended to:
- Primary and secondary schools
- University level education
- Public research institutions
- Museums under the auspices of the Ministry of Education
- Private schools with partial public funding
- Norwegian students abroad
Access rights are clarified jointly by the Norwegian Mapping Authority and the Directorate of Education.
User rights to open data
All data with open data licences may be downloaded or accessed via APIs using the Geonorge portal. If data is subject to open source licences, such licences usually provide broad user rights. Both the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data https://data.norge.no/nlod/en/2.0 and the Creative Commons licences are used for spatial data in the Norwegian infrastructure. Open data is marked with an icon in the Geonorge geoportal, and detailed metadata provides further information on the open data licence types applicable to each specific data set.
User rights for other Norway Digital data
There is a separate education sector agreement for non-open data. Here, students need to apply for access and user rights are limited to educational purposes and research.
The education sector agreement gives students and researchers the right to use data and APIs for regular student work at all levels, including PhD work. This includes the right to analyse and publish research results.
These user rights do not include information activities at the educational organisations or addition of value. Use in research is limited to research financed by the public, and this research should have no specific links with commercial interests. Data cannot be used for commercial research and consultancy work carried out by research organisations. Information about the organisation or student affiliation to an organisation must be provided when applying to post@norgedigitalt.no
Contacts at education units
Each education organisation needs to apply for data access under the education sector agreement.
Each institution/organisation will designate one of its employees as point of contact. This responsibility may be split into different sub-units at large organisations.
Students and researchers need to get in touch with this contact for access to data. This contact is given specific passwords for downloading data from Geonorge.no. Online map services and other APIs can be accessed, but access has to be granted via the organisation by means of the agreement form documents authorising access for computers or groups of computers (IP range).
The contact is in charge of securing the licence agreements and informing students of this, and maintain a list of who is permitted to access the data within the organisation.
Important links and contact details
- A list of educational organisations with access agreements and their contacts can be found here (pdf) (in Norwegian only)
- Queries or questions relating to access and user rights; Norwegian Mapping Authority, NSDI department: post@norgedigitalt.no