Comments (0)

By Luke, 20, May, 2013 8:00 am

This week from Monday through to Sunday you’ll find us at the Digital Shoreditch festival, an event that attracts hundreds of speakers from the most innovative and successful companies and organisations across creative, technical, start-up tech and digital spaces and beyond. During the week, we’ll be exhibiting, speaking and promoting our digital products and services amongst some of Tech City’s most talented digital and technical creative individuals.

The festival has a different theme each day, comprising of panel sessions, key note speeches and discussions – kicking off with today’s “What Tech City” theme. During the day, festival goers will collectively explore the many companies and organisations that make Tech City what it is, focusing on developing new ways to exploit the potential for growing global engagement and improving our digital economy and society.

Continue reading 'Digital Shoreditch festival 2013 – hear how we’re involved!'»

Comments (0)

By Gemma, 17, May, 2013 8:00 am

The GeoVation judging panel met this week and were delighted at the quality and scope of the ideas submitted to our GeoVation Challenge to look for ways that British business could improve their environmental performance using Ordnance Survey products or services in the solution.

The judging panel have now selected a short-list of 10 finalists who have been invited to develop their ideas further at the GeoVation Camp, held on the weekend of 21-23 June 2013 our Southampton head office.

The finalists are:

“Virtual” national transport fleet – an idea to create a connect-able, broker-free web of independent transport companies; breaking down the systemic big company/small company inefficiencies which exist.

Creating an Energy Democracy: The Wasted Energy Network – a platform for encouraging inter-business recycling, triggering waste-based economies and identifying areas of opportunity for sustainable waste management and energy generation systems.

RecycleLink – the idea is to bring waste producers and processors together using a centralised trading platform that will facilitate collaboration and reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.

Continue reading 'Environment challenge finalists invited to GeoVation Camp'»

Comments (0)

By Dee, 16, May, 2013 8:00 am

We would like to thank those of you who entered our recent OS OpenData competition to win an iPad. We had over 100 entries, with many varied uses, from personal projects, producing printed products, delivering environmental applications to supporting charitable work.

We will be contacting some our entrants to work with them to develop case studies, which we will release on our website when available.

In the meantime, here are a few comments from the entrants:

 I have found Open Source Data from Ordnance Survey of extreme benefit in aiding the creation of various map types for submission as part of the planning process. The customer service from OS has been excellent in dealing with any questions and queries in relation to OpenData. quarryplan

Continue reading 'OS OpenData competition – thank you'»

Comments (2)

By Gemma, 3, May, 2013 8:00 am

There’s a twist to our usual ‘just for fun’ map extract quiz today as we celebrate the 2012-13 Premier League Champions. We have a 2012-13 season Manchester United football shirt personalised with O’Survey on the back to give away.

Wondering why we have an O’Survey Manchester United shirt? The club has used one of our OS OpenData products, OS VectorMap District on their website. They have released a video guide to Manchester and changed the colour of the mapping to match their kit colours. You can see the guide on their website if you are a member, or check the image below if not. As a thank you for using our data, they personalised a shirt for us – and we’d like to give it away to a football and mapping fan!

OS VectorMap District being used on the Manchester United website

All you need to do is take a look at the map extracts below, featuring our OS MasterMap products,  and tell us:

• the eight football clubs; and
• the link between them.

Continue reading 'Win an O’Survey football shirt in our football grounds quiz'»

Comments (1)

By Gemma, 8, April, 2013 8:00 am

Today’s guest post comes via Laura Canning at Pitchup.com 

Image courtesy of iStock

As a camper, maps have been part of my kit since my first camping trip, when my dad unfolded a map it looked like he’d had since his first camping trip all those centuries ago. The routes he pointed out we were going to walk looked quite long, and there didn’t appear to be a sweet shop marked anywhere despite long poring over the paper on my part, but it was a map and it was mine.

Opinions still differ on whether the map was handed down to me in a moving ‘now-I-pass-this-on-to-you-my-child’ ceremony, or whether I cried so much Dad had to give me the map to shut me up, but still. It was a map, it was mine, and Dad got his revenge by chuckling wildly at my efforts to fold it.

These days, a map will still always be on my packing list, but now my laptop comes along too to find campsites in England, Wales and beyond, check maps online and to find out what to see and do nearby. Dad disapproves, still clinging possessively to the handful of Sellotaped maps I allowed him to keep, but I can check online maps for any part of the country with a couple of clicks, zoom in to areas I’m interested in and know that everything on it is up to date.

Using Pitchup.com to find campsites brings up Ordnance Survey map views, available on all listings, where users can switch directly to Ordnance Survey view when zooming in to see all the usual OS features. There are top attractions, National Trust properties and Good Pub Guide pubs along the way too – the listing for Callow Top Holiday Park in Derbyshire, for example, has its Ordnance Survey map listing three local pubs and their distance from the park, walking routes from Ashburn and Thorpe and the National Trust properties The Old Manor and Winster Market House, all marked to see at a quick glance.

Continue reading 'Use Ordnance Survey maps with Pitchup.com'»

Comments (19)

By Melanie, 2, April, 2013 10:30 am

At the end of March we saw Ordnance Survey’s free data portal, OS OpenData, upgraded with the release of a new version of OS VectorMap District. Today, sees another significant update to OS OpenData with the release of OS Terrain 50.

OS OpenData users and developers can now access a new fully maintained analytical height product called OS Terrain 50. The new product, which has a similar resolution to Land-Form PANORAMA, will enable users to access an advanced product with consistently maintained height content for the whole of Great Britain.

Land-Form PANORAMA was an unmaintained product and was last updated in the 1990s. The new product will give users more confidence in the currency of the data and will be supplied in additional formats, making it far more accessible.

It can be easily integrated with Vector Map District which is available through OS OpenData, or OS MasterMap Topography Layer and will be a welcome addition to the tools used for terrain analysis and 3D visualisation by a wide range of users.

Arriving as a grid file, it is expected that OS Terrain 50 will be used primarily as an analytical tool for landscape visualisation and analysis over large areas. For example interrogating the visual impact of wind turbines or high-level flood risk assessment, transport infrastructure planning, environmental impact assessment (wind farm location for example), signal propagation (radio, telephone) and security and defence planning

OS Terrain 50 is part of the new OS Terrain family; OS Terrain 5  a mid-resolution DTM, designed to be interoperable with our large-scale data will be released in the near future.

 For now, OS Terrain 50 is available through the OS OpenData portal to download now.

Please select OS Terrain 50 and chose the ‘Supply format’ as ASCII GRID AND GML (GRID) – GB and tick the box to download the files.

Comments (0)

By Cartographic Design team, 26, March, 2013 8:00 am

Recently we told you about the new OS OpenData Award that we’re providing to the British Cartographic Society, offering you the chance to win an Apple iPad.  Today we bring you a guest blog from one of our Cartographic Designers, Charley Glynn, who has used one of our freely available products to map all five of our head offices from 1791 to the present day: 

Our current head office and the grid reference graphic which inspired Charley's map

As cartographic designers,my team and I get a lot of opportunity to design and develop topographic maps.  We’re very familiar with making leisure maps and creating custom styles for contextual maps which is why we are particularly excited when we get the opportunity to submit work into map galleries.  They give us the chance to build on our own map ideas, exercise our creativity and try out new tools and techniques. One such gallery is being hosted at the FOSS4G 2013 conference, the global conference for free and open source software for geospatial use, organised by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.  With that and our new BCS OS OpenData Award in mind I decided to take this opportunity to create something different from my ‘norm’. 

Continue reading 'Mapping out our history with OS OpenData'»

Comments (0)

By Gemma, 22, March, 2013 8:00 am

We are excited to be launching our newly updated OS OpenData product, OS VectorMap District Version 1.0.

Launching today, 22 March 2013, OS VectorMap District Version 1.0 delivers an enhanced user experience over our previous beta version through the provision of additional formats and styling tools. It has been designed for viewing either as a map on its own or as a contextual backdrop to your own data, enabling you to share information more effectively.

OS VectorMap District Version 1.0 is created and maintained from a large scale database and offers an improved representation of features such as roads, roundabouts and railways. The beta version was voted winner in its category at the 2011 British Cartographic Society Awards.

OS VectorMap District Version 1.0 will be freely available under OS OpenData terms.

Comments (0)

By Gemma, 7, March, 2013 8:00 am

We’re delighted to launch our new GeoVation Challenge ‘How can we help British business improve environmental performance? ’

We’re calling for innovative ideas to help businesses remove barriers to easily improving their environmental performance – with a slice of £100,000 up for grabs for the best ideas.

Using GeoVation’s established Powwow methodology to uncover the problems associated with meeting the challenge, we’ve identified a list of problems which form the basis for the challenge.

• How can we help business see the value in their waste?
• How can communities and businesses work together, irrespective of geography and social demographic?
• How do we make environmental performance a more attractive proposition for investment and innovation?

As with previous GeoVation Challenges we are looking for great ideas that address the identified problems using geography, technology and design. Ordnance Survey will be offering a slice of £100,000 in development funding for best use of our data, including OS OpenData and OS OpenSpace.

Continue reading 'Think green for our latest GeoVation challenge'»

Comments (1)

By Mike, 22, January, 2013 8:00 am

We recently came across this great use of Ordnance Survey maps to display an answer to a very old question – where do the supporters of different football teams actually live?

This question has been debated for some time, but the Oxford Internet Institute came up with a great idea to solve it using digital media.

The team consisted primarily of Joshua Melville and Scott Hale and they created a map that displayed Twitter mentions (tweets) of Premiership football teams, using geo-tagging to show the fans locations. This was based on tweets/data collected between August 18 and December 19, 2012.

Initially the team used pinpoints or dots to show each tweet/mention, but the data quickly overwhelmed the map background, so the decision was made to aggregate the locations to post code areas. This proved a more effective way to display their findings although more processing/geographic data was needed to achieve this.

Continue reading 'Football fan maps'»