Interesting challenge, Can you do simple spatial analysis without access to a GIS or raw data ?
I received this email today, what do you think ?
“Hope you are well – I am now 18 months into a career in renewable energy and am the “expert” in GIS in this company. We work with Imass (my old employers) with a GIS-based system for working out how much connections of wind-farms, biomass plants etc. are to the electricity grid. I am going through a data checking exercise and want to compare substation locations digitised by Imass with air photos and maps.
It is easy for us to create a KML file and display on Google Earth but do any of your readers know of a clever way of comparing with OS mapping – without the need of a GIS or ownership of the OS maps? Obviously one by one we can compare on Multimap but how do I quickly move around 800 points?
I wondered if Where’s the Path was along the right lines on this. Not sure where I can find the right forum to discuss.”
My guess is that for largely organisational / licensing issues this would not be possible, even if technically it may be, but it’s an interesting thought…
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
4 replies on “GIS without a GIS ?”
Technically it’s straightforward to put something together to do this with a couple of neat scripts. It’s almost certainly though contravenes the users ‘agreement’ with the data provider (either the OS, or third parties such as MultiMap). 🙁
Gavin Brocks great OSMapsKML file will meet your technical requirements instantly though resolving Licensing issues with OS will take forever!
This highlights what a nonsense the whole OS licensing regime is.
http://www.brock-family.org/gavin/google-earth/osmaps.html
Hi Ed –
Your friend could upload their data in a CSV file to our secure hosted client database and then use the Multimap Search API to display the points on OS Land Ranger or OS Explorer maps.
http://www.multimap.com/share/documentation/api/1.2/web_service/ws_searching.htm
(Contact details at bottom)
cheers, John.
What’s so wrong with using a GIS? There’s open source options if company has zero budget but surely they can stump up the cash for something like Manifold. You could then connect to the openstreetmap web service. Are you adamant that you need the detail that OS offers?
John’s suggestion sounds equally valid and at least you get your OS overlay.