Today Gordon Brown made an announcement alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, that Ordnance Survey maps will be freely available online beginning in April. Lee is working on a report for Brown alongside Nigel Shadbolt, a professor at Southampton University, and opening OS data was the first recommendation that Lee made to Brown.
The announcement discusses how the government has been happy with the success of crime mapping, where the open access has proven that data openness helps improve the safety of citizens.
The government has plans to release 2,000 data sets in all as a new “Smarter Government” initiative, with map data as just one of those. The maps will be provided at the mid-scale of OS’s digital mapping products in the scale range 1:10,000 – 1:49,999. OS products falling into this scale range include OS VectorMap™ Local, 1:10 000 Scale Raster and 1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster.
An article on the announcement in the Guardian pronounces victory for their Free Our Data campaign. You can view a video of the announcement here. There’s a press release from the Ordnance Survey about this announcement here.
Via @pmbatty
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Scratching my head… Is there an error? “The maps will be provided at a map scale of 1:10,000, which is coarser than the typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000″
A 1:10K scale map is finer than 1:25K scale map.
Thanks for the catch, I posted in too much haste. I have found some better clarification of the map scale, and have updated the post. Here’s another good reference in Grouph: http://www.grough.co.uk/magazine/2009/11/17/os-mapping-to-be-freed-%E2%80%93-but-not-for-the-outdoors
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