Free Ordnance Survey Maps Down to Scale 1:10,000 by April ?

The UK Government has announced its intention to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April.  The Free Our Data campaign has worked for over three years to convince the government to "abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies".  The UK prime minister said that it was his intention by April to complete negotiations on the free online provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000.  The online maps would be free to all including commercial organizations who in the past have had to acquire expensive and restrictive licenses.  This measure would bring the UK in line with many other national governments around the world including the US, Canada, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil as well as increasingly state and provincial governments such as California, and cities such as Vancouver.

I blogged earlier about a study by a team at Cambridge University and commissioned by the Treasury that found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m.  Australia and New Zealand have commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.

Thanks to Mapperz for pointing me to the Guardian article.

Comments

[Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne]

This is a great move, but I would caution your comparison to the US. We don't have a consistent base of 1:10000 scale data like the UK. While the US federal government does a wonderful job making its data free much of the finer scale data is locked up by state and local government.

[Peter Batty]

Hi Geoff, several aspects of the Guardian article are misleading, as I point out in my blog post "Ordnance Survey data: right decision, wrong justification" at http://bit.ly/Yj6pv. See also Jo Cook's discussion at Archaeogeek at http://bit.ly/7gVVkf. Everyone in the geo industry would like to have free data and this causes many to over-simplify the issues, which are complex. The Cambridge report you mention has many flaws IMHO - I touch on these but will write more in a future post.

[James]

Geoff, free mapping is of course great news. The real issue for local government in the UK though is the issue of derived data. Local gov has spent years digitising it's own data over the top of Ordnance Survey data and presently we are unable to keep using this data unless we have a full Ordnance Survey license, currently achieved by subscribing to the Mapping Services Agreement. This takes away our choices of using other map bases such as the new 1:1250 UKMap because we can't afford to run OS licenses and simultaneously pay for other map bases. Take away the derived data problem and all that goes away so I'm hoping that's what is going to happen.

With respect to smaller map scales, we have been busy creating our own map base with OpenStreetMap which we feel will suit our requirements better than some of the Ordnance Survey raster products... http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.35125&lon=-0.59863&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF