The Prime Minister and Communities Secretary John Denham has announced that the public will have more access to Ordnance Survey maps from 2010, as part of a Government drive to open up data to improve transparency.
Speaking at a seminar on Smarter Government in Downing Street today, attended by internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Gordon Brown set out how the Government and Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, will open up its data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information.
The proposals, which are being consulted upon, will build on recent reforms such as OS Openspace which have made it possible for some websites to show 1:50,000 mapping without charge.
Gordon Brown said “We live in exciting times; a digital age of high-speed communications and information just a click away that is transforming our daily routines. Technological advances and rising customer expectations are revolutionising how we all do things. Today’s announcement responds to the demands for better use and access to data held by government. In this new world, smarter government is not an option but a necessity.”
Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, who has responsibility for the ‘Making Public Data Public’ initiative, said:
“This is an important step in our public data strategy. About 80 per cent of public sector data mentions a place. Making Ordnance Survey data more freely available will encourage more effective exploitation of public data by businesses, individuals and community organisations.”
Making public data available also enables people to reuse it in different and more imaginative ways than may have originally been intended. Estimates suggest that this could generate as much as a billion pounds for the UK economy.
It is unclear at this stage which Ordnance Survey mapping scales will be available free, but it seems likely that at least 1:50,000 maps will be included in the ‘mid-scale’, and most probably 1:25,000 as well (the announcement suggests right down to 1:10,000).
Both 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 mapping are already available free on Walkhighlands for all the routes on our site. Currently licencing fees are paid to enable us to show these maps to our registered users.
You can discuss what the implications could be on the forum.