Better software, better Digimap

The Digimap service is moving to a new feature-rich mapping engine, allowing greater flexibility and improved performance.

At the time of original procurement in 1999, Laser-Scan's software (now 1Spatial) was renowned for the quality of mapping it could produce automatically, and innovative in its ability to deliver maps to a web browser. Eight years on, however, the software was increasingly causing problems, affecting both the quality of the service and our capacity to respond to the increasing levels of usage of Digimap.

In 2007 EDINA initiated a procurement for a replacement mapping system. The contract was won by a company called Cadcorp Ltd, and we have spent the last year re-engineering Digimap to use the new mapping engine.

EDINA will gain many benefits from this move, not least improved quality of service, easier data management, greater flexibility, better performance and, for the future, the ability to interoperate with other geo-services.

Improvements include:

Superior data handling, which includes native support for more data formats and allows data to be accessed from spatially-enabled databases.
Increased flexibility over how maps look and the ability to deploy these new cartographic styles more quickly.
Higher quality maps generated for printing and the use of PDF as the file format, resulting in crisp, clear maps.

Users will be able to see some of these improvements in Digimap's Ordnance Survey Collection from September. However, in the phase 1 project that has just been completed, we have focused on replicating what users have had access to in the past. The new mapping application gives some indication of the potential of the new Digimap architecture but it will be the phase 2 work, where the focus is on the other Digimap Collections and a new Digimap Carto, which will show the real differences.

There are now many online mapping services available. Digimap has differentiated itself from many of these because of the high quality and highly detailed mapping and data it provides. The new mapping engine, along with the new architecture, now allows us to compete functionally too and by doing so continue to offer a valuable, usable and useful, value-for-money service.

Digimap