So 10 days ago now, the UK Government announced that they would be freeing up some Ordnance Survey data as part of a “drive to improve transparency”. You can read reactions to this all over the geospatial blogs (see Mapperz excellent round-up), some ambivalent, others mostly positive.

Me, I’m with the ambivalent crowd. On one level, assuming it’s actually useful datasets made available, and assuming we get to use them how we’d like to (using it in our internal GIS, for example), it will be great, and my colleagues will find their jobs considerably easier. However, like a lot of things the UK Government has done recently, this was handled badly (the lack of Ordnance Survey input into the original announcement,  speaks volumes). If it’s not going to be done willingly, will we see the same quality? The same commitment to survey the rural areas? Presumably, the cost of the remaining datasets will go up to cover the projected loss of revenue (whatever that is), so a lot of small businesses could end up in a worse situation than they are now- with expensive data that they can’t afford, or free data that’s not fit for purpose because it’s not complete or recently updated. Like Peter Batty, I don’t want our data brought in line with that of the US, as it’s currently much better!

I’m glad there has been a change, as I broadly support the Free Our Data campaign, and have done since it started, but I wanted it to be well thought through and planned for, and not a snap decision to try and win some votes. How naive of me…

I’m also concerned, like Peter Batty, about the affect on OpenStreetMap. I’ve been an enthusiastic convert to the benefits of OSM, since hearing of Muki Haklay’s completeness studies, and with seeing some of the beautiful maps and really cool innovations that it has spawned recently. At conferences in the UK this year OSM felt like the juggernaut it was impossible to ignore, and why would you want to?  OSM is now a valuable part of the UK geospatial ecosystem and I would hate to see that change.

Via the Guardian’s Free Our Data Blog, but with remarkably little fanfare elsewhere- the UK Government have released their new strategy for the Ordnance Survey. The results have the potential to be really good, but might also be a bit of a damp squib. The big concession is an extended OS OpenSpace service:

It will provide greater access to free use of a number of Ordnance Survey products from 1:10,000 scale through to 1:1 million scale. It will also include official boundaries information.

This is good news, though not as forward thinking as I’d like, unless the terms and conditions for the use of Open Space change dramatically. In my dreams, they are going to release their mapping via WMS- after all it would save them having to ship out all those update cds every year…

The new pricing strucure for full data access will be out in October, apparently. I’m not holding my breath for any nice friendly educational-charity fee structures though, since the whole document seems to assume you’re either an individual (read hobbyist) or a commercial company, and the trouble with educational charities is that we don’t really fit into a sensible box like that.

What’s nice though, is that the whole document is available online as a commentable document. Not sure how much notice will be taken of feedback, but it’s a start!

From the O’Reilly Radar blog comes this great presentation from Dave Gray, which as Tim O’Reilly says himself

is a must-read, must-share for anyone who cares about either science or open access.

It’s also one of the most engaging “powerpoints” you’ll see in a while, showing that it’s possible to have something with lots of text, yet still be interesting and attractive. Give it a go and tell your friends!

I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.

While I now have a site up again, pretty much ready to go bar the shouting, I’ve had an interesting time playing with some new toys in the process, so here’s a quick run-down:

• Mapfish and GeoadminSuite: A funky framework for widgetising openlayers. Geoadminsuite connects mapserver, openlayers and mapfish to manage data and create really nice mapfish applications. Way cool. Progress so far- it’s all up and running, though GeoadminSuite had teething troubles that have hopefully been sorted in the latest svn release.
• Openlayers: OK, so I’m just catching up with the latest release after ducking out for a while to do “real work”, but I have to say I like the new(er) features. It was nice to be able to do popups without needing to re-write the code for every version of every flavour of browser. That’s not openlayers’ fault of course, just issues with “standards” for things like DOM, which I don’t claim to understand.
• Openstreetmap WMS data from Wheregroup: Comes in free and paid-for flavours though details on pricing and terms of service for the commercial version were sketchy on a first skim of the website. This could be really handy to use as background mapping data for web maps, although there are issues of completeness (as always) and it probably needs running through our own mapserver to sort out the styling. This is definitely a goer- I just need to figure out which of the 50 or so layers they publish are really necessary and at what scale. And some kind of completeness metric, so we know how reliable the data is for a given area…
• Openstreetmap shapefiles from Cloudmade: A reduced dataset for the UK, with less layers. This might be a better option for us to use as we can control the styling better at the source. As a cheat, I’m going to load it all up in Quantum GIS, style it there, and use the mapserver export plugin to quickly build my map file.
• Mapnik: One of my colleagues would very much like us to create our own openstreetmap wms server, and use mapnik. I’d love to, as the cartography is really good, but after diving into it today, I have to say I think I need some hand holding before I can actually make it serve maps. We’ll see…

Also rans:

• Ordnance Survey have changed the licensing for their OpenSpace product: You still need a license to use their data, but you can download the development kit from sourceforge. The license has also been changed to have more “clarity” in terms of the ownership of derived data. It would be churlish to suggest that this has anything to do with the “Show Us a Better Way” mess up, wouldn’t it? The problem is, you still need to pay for the background data, so we’re back up to points 2 and 3 above…
• Amazon launches public datasets: This, in my limited experience, seems to be a duplication of ideas that are already out there. That’s fine when it’s software, and you want to stomp all over your rivals, but wouldn’t it have been nice for them to give their support to an existing data repository?

Things to play with next:

• Openaerialmap: Also has a wms service…

All Points Blog pointed me at the direction of a piece on the mess of mapping and postcode data in Northern Ireland, which got me thinking a bit about this rush to rely on location-based services and always-on connections to “the cloud/interweb”.

At first glance, the situation in Ireland (National Mapping agency has copyright on maps, Post Office has copyright on property location) sounds very familiar. However, Ireland doesn’t have postcodes yet, so things are a not so cut and dried- in this day and age, if you had to go to an awful lot of trouble to implement a system for locating properties, would you invent the postcode system or something else?

What worries me though, is this assumption that the best solution is a technological one. Apparently LBS are the way forward, so much so that your Gran will know her position (in lat/long or a local coordinate system? not sure) the same way that she now knows her address. If she doesn’t remember it, then she can go to her mobile device or google maps and find it out. Clearly this writer is very lucky that he lives in an ultra-connected area with great GPS/phone signal, never has a powercut and has an entire family/social network of technologically adept people who won’t bat an eyelid at this.

It is only in the last 50 years that power of some kind has been laid on to every house in the UK, after many decades of trying. I think it’s dangerous to assume that ubiquitous computing will reach all areas and all social classes in a few years, and it’s also dangerous to assume that everyone will jump into it whole-heartedly to such an extent that you could rely on it totally for critical infrastructure like postal services.

Firstly, if you’ve seen this post before, apologies. It got lost in a previous re-organisation of the blog and I thought it was worth re-posting…

You can get free contour data for the UK from the Scottish Mountaineering Club website. It’s based on public domain NASA data, cleaned up by the club and made freely available. It comes in garmin .img format, in several zip files, which roughly represent areas of the country. See their web page for an explanation of the areas.

Edit: Leszek has some great alternatives methods and options for data- check the comments.

1. To convert the img files to something (more) useful, the best programme I’ve found is gpsmapedit. You need to register it to get the full functionality. This costs 42 euros (umm, about 32 pounds at the moment) but allows you to use the programme on up to four computers.
2. In gpsmapedit, click “open” or “add” and load up all the img files you want to convert. Note that they will be merged into one big file so for the sake of your poor computer, choose only the areas that you need.
3. Go to file/export/mapinfo file, select level “0″, this includes the minor contours (down to 10m) as well as the major contours (100m)
4. When it has finished exporting, you can shut it down. If you’re using mapinfo, then skip to step 6.
5. In ArcGIS, crack open ArcCatalog, and load the “Arcview 8.x tools” toolbar. Move your mapinfo files to a location on your computer that has no spaces in it’s path name and a short path. No really, do. It will crash otherwise. Choose the “mif to shapefile” converter. Alternatively, you could do this with ogr2ogr. See the website for usage.
6. The resulting file (mapinfo or shape) is in wgs84 projection, with the height values in feet, so for use in a British National Grid environment you need to re-project it. The height values are in the attribute field “label”, so add another field for holding the converted height and use the tool of your choice to convert the values in the “label” column to metres.

Note that this data is good for broad-based terrain modelling only. If you need something more accurate you’re going to have to buy it…

If you have any alternatives to this method let me know in the comments!

There have been a thought-provoking series of posts about the relevance of the Ordnance Survey. It’s good that people are questioning the need for a national mapping agency, but I think the answer has to be a resounding YES. The OpenGeoData blog doesn’t.

To quote:

“Me, I just don’t care about the Ordnance Survey. It’s not “evil” or “immoral”, it just doesn’t matter. I think that Open Maps can do better, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Maps, but it’s not a crusade it’s just a superior way of working together and generating maps.”

Superior is an interesting choice of word in this context. It’s perfectly fair for OpenGeoData to think that Openstreetmap suits his mapping needs, but to call it superior, and to say that the Ordnance Survey is irrelevant is a little short-sighted. The Ordnance Survey, and any national mapping agency, have a responsibility far beyond creating maps for the general population to use to get from A to B, and I wonder if Openstreetmap honestly feel that they are ready to provide disaster response mapping, or have the resources in place to ensure that their coverage of the entire country is current to within one year or less.

I like Openstreetmap a lot, and really enjoyed the talk that Steve Coast gave at OKCon last weekend, and I think they have a useful place in the free data debate, but I don’t see them as a replacement for our national mapping requirements. In my opinion, pretending that they are simply dilutes the fight to change the Ordnance Survey’s licensing policy.