In early April, JISC and the Ordnance Survey (OS) announced the renewal of the agreement which provides access to a range of OS products for the higher and further education communities. The new agreement will be for a period of five years.
Newsline from EDINA
July 2004: Volume 9, Issue 2
by Emma Sutton
In early April, JISC and the Ordnance Survey (OS) announced the renewal of the agreement which provides access to a range of OS products for the higher and further education communities. The new agreement will be for a period of five years.
EDINA Digimap, launched in January 2000, will continue to provide students and academic staff in UK universities and colleges with web-based access to OS mapping. Registered users can produce high-quality maps and download data files to use in local application software. With some 17,000 active registered users from 85 universities and colleges, Digimap is now successfully embedded as a research and teaching tool in the academic sector, broadening the use of geographic information and encouraging research that previously would have been difficult for reasons of access and data costs. Digimap is used all day and every day, with around 12,000 sessions per month. Over the last 12 months users have created 130,000 maps for printing. In 2003 the commercial value of data downloaded through Digimap was estimated at £6 million.
Information about subscribing and registering under the new terms will be posted on http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/access/.
The range of products to be offered through Digimap will increase under the new JISC/OS agreement. Two new raster data sets and a new, more detailed, height dataset will be available:
More information on each of these products can be found on the Ordnance Survey website or on the EDINA Digimap products description web page.
Those who follow developments at the Ordnance Survey will know that the OS Land-Line product is being replaced by the OS MasterMap® topographic layer. OS MasterMap is a suite of products and part of the framework within which all future OS products will be released. The central concept of the OS MasterMap framework is the closer relationship between real world objects and features held in the OS spatial database. MasterMap is 'object-oriented': it is organised and structured in a very different way and is provided in a very different format. This represents a fundamental change in the way in which OS spatial data are available. More information on MasterMap can be found on the Ordnance Survey web site.
The new JISC/OS agreement includes two of the MasterMap layers - Topography and the Integrated Transport Network (ITN). The former is the replacement for Land-Line.Plus and the most detailed topographic information available in Great Britain; the latter is a multimodal overview of Britain's transport infrastructure comprising the roads network and road routing information.
No decision has yet been made by JISC on how and when the OS MasterMap datasets will be delivered to the academic community. Check the EDINA Digimap web site for news as it emerges. In the meantime, if you have any queries about the supply of MasterMap, please contact Lorraine Estelle at JISC.
During the summer of 2004, EDINA intend to add a map-based selection facility to the Digimap Download interface. Other enhancements planned include adding simple map analysis to Carto, improvements to Code-Point Download to provide greater flexibility in data selection, and access to earlier versions of map data products through Digimap Download.