dear all, (pls forgive excited cross-posting),
The UK Government's response to the consultation on opening national
mapping data has been published. A selection of datasets will be
available from tomorrow, April 1st, free for re-use with no
restrictions. This includes postcode coordinates, administrative
boundaries and geographic names.
A nice summary of the government response can be seen here:
http://ernestmarples.com/blog/2010/03/government-response-to-ordnance-survey-consultation-published/
There's also positive news for Open Source GIS in the small print;
OS is going to take on the national-level INSPIRE data services,
build them with free software, and make their work available.
"3.28 Ordnance Survey will design, specify, create and acceptance test
repeatable INSPIRE compliant hosted data services, together with an
overarching portal to support the View and Metadata Services. These
platforms will then be offered back to the community as Open Source
software."
The open data release is not "the works", the largest scale data for
which OpenStreetmap is the competition (branded MasterMap) is not yet
included. But it is a great start and sets a terrific precedent for
public access to state-collected geodata worldwide.
As postal code areas here typically span a few houses, and there's been
a lot of contention about the "ownership" of the postcode data, this is
a particularly valuable resource to see open licensed.
On the whole, w00t to the power of w00t.
jo
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