Ordnance Survey, other gov databases move to Biz dept Whitehall announced yesterday that it had shunted the Ordnance Survey, Met Office and Land Registry agencies over to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The OS office had previously operated under the Department for Communities and Local Government but has been shifted, along with the Met Office and Land …
What would be REALLY useful would be releasing for free (because the tax payer has already paid for it once) mapping and weather data. This would be infinitely more useful than the usual obscure data sets like "Distribution and ethic origin of disadvantaged lesbian wheelchair-bound social workers by postcode" which, strangely enough, not many people at all could give a gnats nuts about.
...but, of course, it won't happen, will it?
It only goes down to 1:50k - no 1:25k, so it is nigh on useless for most outdoorsy type stuff.
Yes they do have data at that scale, but no contours etc so for hiking, riding etc it's useless.
It's nice to see that they have finally opened up the boundary info though. Distance based clustering of markers on a map is technically swanky and all, but having boundary data to do heirachically ordered markers by region is a more useful solution.
In answer to the two above posts, you can get both the map data and postcode data for free. See http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-opendata.html . These are absolutely free to use, change, do whatever you want with. There is also the OpenSpace tool which you can use to embed mapping on your own website, or do mash-ups with other data.
So don't say you can't get map data for free.....
The availability of high-quality nautical charts in Europe is scandalous. Mariners are forced to pay through the nose for data that taxpayers have already paid their local HGO to collect, only for it to be punted to a cartel of corporations who package it in any number of incompatible proprietary and encrypted formats in order to fleece a captive market, and to promote vendor lock-in to their partner ECDIS system integrators.
The NOAA somehow manage to provide S-57 vector charts for the whole of North America for free - why can't the European HGOs man up and do the same. For an obvious cause like maritime safety, anything else is a disgrace.
As it is, it's actually far cheaper to bring up an Amazon EC2 farm to crack the S-63/Navionics/CMap chart encryption than it is to pay these conmen.
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