Category Archives: GIS

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!