GeoBase Unrestricted Use Licence Agreement (Canada Family)

The Canadian federal geospatial data licence family — pre-OGL-Canada GeoBase / GeoGratis licences and their successors.

The 'GeoBase / Canada family' refers to the cluster of licences under which Canadian federal geospatial data has been published since the mid-2000s. The original GeoBase Unrestricted Use Licence Agreement covered the canonical national geospatial framework datasets — the National Road Network, the National Hydro Network, administrative boundaries, and the National Topographic Database — and was structured as a permissive licence with attribution requirements.

By the early 2010s the licence had attracted criticism for being verbose, internally inconsistent across versions, and difficult to combine with international open-data sources. The 2013 introduction of the Open Government Licence — Canada (OGL-Canada) addressed those concerns with a single permissive attribution licence drafted explicitly for compatibility with CC BY 4.0 and the Open Data Commons family.

Datasets originally published under the GeoBase family (and the related GeoGratis Licence) remain available under their original terms unless re-released. The cluster is referenced as 'the Canada family' in international comparison work because the multiple sub-licences shared a common drafting lineage and were effectively a single regime in practice.