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Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Ordnance Survey embraces UGC.. it’s a start

No hell has not frozen over, Ordnance Survey finally launched their explore portal this week, a site designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists and anyone interested in the outdoors to share their walks and favourite places.

explore portal

Although this is nothing new, platial after all offered similar functionality a few years ago, this has been a long time coming, I was involved in some of the design work over a year ago! this is still an important step forward for the OS.

From a technology point of view the service was/is underpinned by the backend system developed to support the long delayed OpenSpace project, so hopefully there will be news about that soon.

Although I would take issue with some of the T&C’s, this really is progress in the right direction from Southampton.

Update: My first walk is here.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

24 replies on “Ordnance Survey embraces UGC.. it’s a start”

A month goes by and still the explore blog has a link to an openlayers viewer for the explore WMS !

I suggest we encourage the public to do a new Kinder trespass by using

http://ge.pythonmoo.co.uk/maps/osmap.htm

(sadly only seems to work properly in Firefox)

Hope the pythonmoo server can take it. Oh And you can print nice big maps from this site too.

@ free the OS, either the OS is very open in it’s comments policy, or the moderator does not understand he contents of that blog post.

Still you have to be impressed by the Openlayers framework, better than the original OS slippy map for sure, and of course it’s an API.

Well you would have thought that some of the explore developers might just look at the blog. If they did then would they have notified the OS management? If the management were notified then would we expect them to do anything? Perhaps the presence of the public facing explore WMS is being left as a ‘Leak’ on purpose.

Of course the Google Maps API can be used to display tiles from the explore WMS too. Ed, are you or Google going to be the first to dare to publish such a page?!

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