Open by Justin Marty

I’ve been mulling over the nature of Open Data, Open Source and just general openness for a while now and, on the whole, these are admirable concepts. Access to data and software can only bring benefits for the most part. » Continue reading “Open all hours”

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…?”

The Guardian recently ran an article discussing availability of Ordnance Survey’s MasterMap product. As a daily user of MasterMap on projects, I would be so glad to see MasterMap become freely available; besides access to good quality mapping having obvious benefits for archaeology as a whole, especially to those who do not have access to resources such as Digimap and other resources hosted by Edina, from a commercial perspective, I could build and maintain a library of map data rather than constantly having to reprocess bits under project specific license agreements.

Having said this, I would be concerned about the maintenance of what is currently an outstanding dataset and the other services currently provided by the OS (and have mentioned this before); yes, some of the topographic polygon classifications in MasterMap are amusing to say the least, but the overall quality of the spatial information is world class and must be maintained alongside the services which make the data so useful (eg GPS survey, the Positional Accuracy Improvement (PAI) programme, and helping organisations such as English Heritage use geographic information effectively).