The Ordnance Survey released their equivalent to Googlemaps called OpenSpace a while back now and I’ve been experimenting with it. I love having access to the high quality maps produced by the OS, other offerings such as Googlemaps and OpenStreetMap are simply not a match for the cartographic output of the OS. Having said this, there is still much room for improvement on the technical side of things: Based on OpenLayers, the OS OpenSpace platform is far from easy to get to grips compared to eg the Googlemaps API with simple tasks such as adding GeoRSS feeds and KML layers proving rather tricky let alone including external base layers. And the help and support is rather poor with few examples and much of the forum activity on the part of the OS team being far from explanatory. But still, as we start to see editing tools capable of working with these Javascript APIs, things should improve; I for one am looking forward to this!

Some news regarding the Ordnance Survey and spatial data in the UK has come to me via the wonders of GIS User and my work. Once again, OS licensing is the key issue but now there is a another driving force on the scene which may have an impact. » Continue reading “Time’s up for the Ordnance Survey…?”

This was the title of presentation given by Mary Spence, the outgoing president of the British Cartographic Society, at the Institute for Archaeologists annual conference last week. The presentation was given in the same session in which I was presenting, revolving around new technologies, particularly mobile spatial technologies, in archaeology. I was looking forward to the talk by Mary Spence as I had previously heard her on the radio talking about issues relating to making maps in today’s techno-centric world; she was, at that time, pushing for improvements in the quality of maps and the media had picked up on her criticisms of the kinds of maps based on eg Google Maps and Yahoo Maps which are often cartographically quite poor. » Continue reading “Could do better…”

Tis true, KML (Keyhole Markup Language, as developed by Google for use with their Google Earth app) has been adopted as an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard, as reported on the Google blog and the OGC news page. Being a simple markup language like HTML, KML is a fantastically easy way to represent spatial information and is being used by an increasing number of apps not only to publish to Google Earth but to transfer data between systems and serve information on demand. OGC standardisation of the format is the icing on the cake for what has turned out to be a really useful format. Well done Google!