Category: Ordnance Survey

Categories
GIS Ordnance Survey

Land-Line the end is in sight !

With very little fanfare the retirement of Land-Line the Ordnance Survey’s most important cartographic product was announced yesterday, oddly the main story on the OS website is about a graduate training programme !

Some seven years after the introduction of OS MasterMap, the database focused feature dataset will become the primary product for most of the professional business customers of OS in September 2008.

This has been a long time in coming, but it is a major step forward for the industry in the UK. Thing in terms of moving from MS-DOS to Windows 95 and will appreciate the scope of the change.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey Thoughts

The Lockerbie question and OS funding

This week the guardian “free our data” campaign recaps on a years activities and what progress has been made, not a great deal I’m afraid, awareness may have been increased, but this is still not an issue on the political radar screen because as Charles and Michael point out, there really is nobody in government with the remit for information.

This week a comment I made at the Open Knowledge conference last weekend is used, I think, to support the campaigns aims, maybe it can be used in that way, but my intention in bringing up the “Lockerbie question” was to point out the dangers of under-funding national mapping.

The “next Lockerbie” – a disaster such as a plane crash in a remote area – could bring problems for emergency services. Last year the government ended its “National Interest Mapping Service Agreement”, which funded the mapping by Ordnance Survey of remote areas that a private organisation might not bother with. As recently as 2004-05, Nimsa made up 11% of the Ordnance Survey’s turnover. The effect, says Ed Parsons, until December chief technology officer of OS, is that changes in remote areas of Scotland may go unmapped for years – “which is fine, until the next Lockerbie happens”. OS says it will continue a “mapping for emergencies” helpline service.

I would argue that the demise of NIMSA points out the major weakness in the argument for direct taxpayer funding of national mapping activities, in the one area of the work carried out by the OS which was directly funded by government, that funding was cut when the money got tight, and these activities were sacrificed to allow DCLG to continue to fund tasks it deemed more important.

The only organisations which actually value information are those who use it, and it therefore is logical that they should pay for it.

However, although I firmly believe the current funding model for the OS is the correct one, I am not going to argue that as currently defined the licensing framework around the crown copyright data the OS manages is fit for purpose.

There needs to be a fundamentally new approach to licensing OS data which allows greater access to information, and yes for some types of data and for some types of user this would be without cost to the end user. This could be achieved with minimal impact on the financial performance of OS but could inject a major boost to the UK GI industry.

Written and submitted from the BA lounge, Schipol, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS Ordnance Survey Thoughts

Do you need a map comrade ?

KGB ManI’m not sure of their real value, but I just love the way Landmark are marketing their scanned Soviet Era Military Mapping, or as their say KGB Maps of Great Britain. .
Great stuff Guys !!

In themselves these maps are not a new discovery but to have them made available in a more accessible digital form is an interesting development. To the “Open” mapping community who are looking for the position of Urban Motorways, Airports and more recent developments missing from the digitised NPE series, this could be a potential source.

Of course the data would need to be re-projected etc., but this is clearly within the capability of the community now – also these maps are a rich source of building footprint data, dated yes, but in themselves an interesting historic view of Britain’s cities.

I have one little issue still in the back of my mind, until a couple of years ago my ex-employers maintained that these Russian maps contained OS copyright material.. “stolen” by Soviet spies I no doubt.. has something happened to their change their minds ?

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