Category Archives: Digimap

Digimap Dataset Updates: May 2016

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VectorMap Local Raster

Latest version of OS VectorMap Local Raster

A number of datasets in the Ordnance Survey Collection have been updated in May this year. We’ve also made a number of improvements to some of the datasets that are popular for 3D modelling which will hopefully make it easier to use these datasets in CAD applications. The main changes are:

  • OS MasterMap Sites Layer now available in DWG and ESRI Shapefile format (previously it was only available in GML)
  • OS Terrain 5 DTM is now available in XYZ format for use in CAD applications
  • OS Terrain 5 Contours in DWG format are now provided as as 3D contours with the height of each feature set to the correct contour height

The data format help page has been updated to reflect these changes and is a good place to go if you are interested to see which datasets are available in a specific format.

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First set of dataset updates in 2016

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A number of datasets have been updated in January in both the Ordnance Survey and Marine collections.

We reported back in December that the new ‘No Marginallia’ version of SeaZone HydroView Charts were available to download through Marine Download. Since releasing this new version we have seen nearly 15% of downloads now requesting the new ‘No Marginalia’ version, which is great to see. Hot on the heels of this we have now made this new version available in the new Chart Roam application, which replaced Marine Maps. The ‘No Marginalia’ version was ideal for use in Chart Roam as the removed map marginalia means the charts are ideal for use in the slippy map interface in Chart Roam.

ChartRoam-blog

The tables below lists all the datasets that have been updated in each collection together with the publishing date for each one.

Ordnance Survey Roam

Product Name OS Publication Date
1:25,000 Scale Colour Raster December 2015
1:50,000 Scale Colour Raster December 2015
OS VectorMap® District September 2015

Ordnance Survey Data Download

Product Name OS Publication Date
1:25,000 Scale Colour Raster December 2015
1:50,000 Scale Colour Raster December 2015
Points of Interest December 2015
OS Open Names January 2015

Chart Roam

Product Name SeaZone Publication Date
HydroView Charts August 2015

 

If you have any questions about the dataset updates or Digimap please contact us:

  • Phone: 0131 650 3302
  • Email: edina@ed.ac.uk

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OS MasterMap Topography Layer now available in outline ‘plan’ style for CAD users

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In April 2015 we made OS MasterMap Topography Layer data available to CAD users in DWG format. If you missed the announcement you can read all about it in this blog post. Since adding this option to Digimap we have processed over 13,000 orders for MasterMap in DWG format. Building on this we have now produced an outline ‘Plan’ style of MasterMap in DWG format which is a stripped down representation that mimics the alternative ‘Line Drawing’ style of MasterMap available in the Digimap Roam application.

OS MasterMap Topography Layer in standard and plan style

OS MasterMap Topography Layer in standard and plan style

The alternative ‘Plan’ style is a cut down version of the full dataset and does not include polygons, users requiring the full dataset should download the original ‘Standard’ style which includes both lines and polygons.

The style is specified in the basket window of the Data Download application using the drop-down in the ‘Theme’ column:

Selecting DWG plan style in the basket

Selecting DWG plan style in the basket

We hope you find this new style useful, if you have any questions or suggestions for further improvements please contact us:

  • Phone: 0131 650 3302
  • Email: edina@ed.ac.uk

New user registration is a hit with staff and students

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Digimap’s new registration system was released on the 28th of January, we hope you’ll agree that it is a huge improvement over the  previous version.

Users no longer have to wait up to 48 hours for registrations to be approved, they simply have to click a link in an email sent to them after filling in the registration form.

It already has its fans leading one site rep to say “I love the new registration system!” and another told us “Congratulations on instant registration for students. This is going to be very popular.”

The new instant access system is much more inline with user expectations from online services.  Removing the need to wait overnight (or longer over weekends) to gain access has been very popular and has resulted in a significant increase in registrations during February.  Over 6000 registrations were processed through the new system at all times of day and night!

We now need your help to make sure that the support material at your institution is up-to-date and that your students know that they can have access to the service the same day.

There is a full description of how to register using the new system in the help pages which guides you through the process:

http://digimap.edina.ac.uk/webhelp/digimapsupport/about.htm#access/registration.htm

If you are responsible for any local support pages, lecture notes, practical guides and any other course material please make sure these get updated. We actively encourage the incorporation of the images and text from the help page in any material produced. Please can you circulate this information as widely as possible to ensure that all users have up to date guidance.

One final plea is that you highlight the importance of entering the correct email address when registering.  This should be an email address that is used regularly and it should be spelt correctly!

 

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New Digimap registration system – preview

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As blogged about last month, we have been working on a new Digimap registration system which will be released next Tuesday (27th January) The current registration system has been in place for over ten years. It has served us well, but it is now rather dated especially because users have to wait for their registration to be manually approved and processed overnight. The new registration system allows users to get instant access to Digimap. This will be a significant improvement and help those students that leave their Digimap coursework a bit late! At least now they will be able to get access quickly and easily (unfortunately we can’t guarantee they’ll get the work submitted on time though!) Detailed help pages will be available from Wednesday, once the release has been completed and Digimap is available to users. To help prepare site reps and support staff for the change, here is an overview of the registration process.   Registering with Digimap Registration will now be an automated two-step process. Users will supply their details to register and then they must activate access to collections by agreeing to the individual licences. After logging into Digimap to start, users will be presented with the registration form to enter their name, email address, department, status and where they heard about Digimap. Registration form After hitting the submit button, users will be sent an email with a link to verify their account.  Once they have successfully verified, they will be directed back to the Digimap homepage, where they then complete the next step of activating collection access. registration_verify_600 registration_verify_confirmation_600 Agreeing to licence for Digimap collections (activating access) After verifying their email address, users will need to agree to the licences for each of the specific Digimap collections that they wish to use, this is done through the licence agreements page. registration_licence_agreement2_600 Users will only be able to agree to licences for the collections that their institution subscribes to.  Once the user has agreed to the licence(s) and hit the confirm button, they will have access to those Digimap collections. If the process is completed in one go, it takes no more than a few minutes.  Much quicker than the current system! Existing users Existing users will not notice any change unless they have not been active in a collection for more than 12 months.  Access to a collection expires after 12 months of inactivity.  If that’s the case, they will be prompted to accept the licence when they try to access an application in that collection.  Generally though, if someone has not accessed a particular collection for more than 12 months, we don’t expect they will activate access and therefore will not notice any change with the new system.  Access to active collections will carry on as normal. If you have any questions or comments, please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk

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Service Availability 26 – 28th Jan – new registration system release

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New users will not be able to register for Digimap from 4pm on 26th Jan and all Digimap services will be unavailable all day on 27th Jan. Normal service will resume by 9am on 28th Jan. This is to allow us to release a new Registration System.

New registrations for Digimap (using the current system) will be closed from 4pm Monday 26th January.

Digimap will then be unavailable all day on Tuesday 27th January, while we release the new system.

The service will be available again from Wednesday 28th 9am.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Due to the significant changes required to release the new system, we must close access to Digimap during this time.

We urge you to create any maps or download data that you may need during the period of service unavailability in advance.

The new registration system will allow users to register and instantly access Digimap Collections. New registrations will no longer have to be manually approved by the EDINA Helpdesk and then processed overnight. This will speed up access for new users significantly.

Existing registered and active users will not notice any change.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact EDINA on edina@ed.ac.uk or 0131 650 3302.

More details about how the new system looks and works will be posted on the Digimap blog in the New Year.

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EDINA GeoForum 2014

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EDINA hosts an annual gathering for it’s GeoServices with an aim to connect with users from institutions from around the country.  This years event was held in Edinburgh on the 19th June.  The event went well and there was a buzz around the informatics forum venue.  I don’t really want to provide a summary of the event as there is already a great summary on the Digimap Blog and if this doesn’t provide enough detail, the live blog transcript should (reps to @suchprettyeyes for the live blog – no idea how she can record everything in real-time).

What i would like to do here is to discuss a couple of topics that seemed to surface during the day.

Know your users

Who uses GIS data?  Geographers of course is the obvious answer, but the use of geospatial data is now much wider than just earth and environmental science.  EDINA has recognised this for some time and has worked hard to make it’s service interfaces as intuitive as possible.  In addition, there has been a conscious decision to promote best practice through the interfaces and to use the correct language so that users actually learn about GIS and geospatial terms just by using the services.

Geoservice Personas

Geoservice Personas

Geoforum provides a vital link between the service team and users.  It is our chance to speak to users directly and for users to provide feedback on what they like, what they dont like and what they would like to see in the service.

Turning Data into Information

Some users want to get their hands on the raw data so that they can use it as basedata for their own analysis, others prefer to receive a polished product that will add value to their coursework or research.  EDINA‘s geoservices tries to accomodat such diverse user needs.  The role of many geospatial professionals is to take data and turn it into useful information.

PG_Tips

Data and Information

This message was echoed by keynote speaker Peter Gibbs of the UK Met Office.  Peter eloquently demonstrated the vast number of data sources that fed into our weather reports. The meteorologists job was to take this data, analyse it, produce a best case scenario and present this in an easy to understand format accessible to the general public.  The public don’t really care how you created the forecast, they just want to spend less than 2 minutes finding out if they need to take a brolly to work.  This encapsulates much of the geospatial industries role, turning data into usable information which can inform decisions.

 Connected systems and data

Everything is linked. Virtually nothing can be considered in isolation.  This means that many users will be consuming geospatial data from EDINA and combining it with other datasets.  EDINA has recognised this and has started to connect some of its collections in Digimap.  For example, you can create an annotation in one collection and then access it in another.  This allows users to map historic features, or trace geological features and visualise these on modern OS maps. But we are now thinking about taking this further and investigating how to overlay data from one collection in another.  There is a bit of work to be done here but it could open things up.  Why stop at just overlaying EDINA Digimap data in other Digimap collections? Would it be useful to be able to overlay external feeds from organisations such as the Environment Agency or SEPA in Digimap Roam?

Mobile

The rise of the smartphone seems unstoppable.  Almost everyone has one and we are increasingly accessing web services through our mobiles.  Fieldtrip GB is a free app from EDINA that runs on Android and iPhone and allows users to collect data on their smartphone.  What does it do?

  • good, clear cartography, just as you would expect from EDINA’s geoservices team
  • users can design their own data collection forms that suit their needs.
  • the app is designed to work in “offline” mode meaning you can pre-load maps and dont require a 3G signal to use it in the field
  • exports data to csv, kml and geojson
  • did i mention it is free!
FtGB

Fieldtrip GB

In addition to Fieldtrip GB, EDINA is working on a GoGeo app which will help people keep up to date with geospatial news and events as well as allowing users to discover data while on the move.

What’s on the horizon?

The geoservices team are constantly updating and upgrading services.  Some of this work is invisible to the user as it is backend stuff. Optimising databases, improving searching and just making sure the services are as fast and reliable as possible.  But there are a number of exciting projects that should offer users new functionality over the next year.  The easiest way to find out more is to flick through Guy McGarva’s forward looking presentation.


Digimap for Schools adds historic map layer

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DFS

Old and new

Digimap for Schools has added a new historic map layer to the popular online map service, extending its potential for use in schools across a wider spectrum of the national curriculum.

The new historic map layer features mapping from the 1890s and covers the whole of Great Britain. Teachers and pupils will be able to overlay the historic maps over current mapping and compare changes in the landscape in their areas and beyond.

Digimap for Schools is an online application developed by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh. It gives schools easy access to a wide range of Ordnance Survey mapping using a simple login and password. The service is available to all pupils regardless of age. It allows schools to access a variety of mapping scales including Ordnance Survey’s most detailed OS MasterMap and the famous OS Explorer mapping at 1:25,000 scale which is ideal for outdoor activity.

The historic Ordnance Survey maps have been scanned and geo-referenced by the National Library of Scotland (NLS)and made available in Digimap for Schools. The maps were originally published between 1895 and 1899 as the Revised New Series in England and Wales and the 2nd Edition in Scotland. The historic maps are high quality scans at 400dpi for Scotland and 600dpi for England and Wales. This means that they can be enlarged far beyond their original scale of 1 inch to 1 mile.
OSElaine Owen, Education Manager at Ordnance Survey, added: “This new layer in Digimap for Schools is a fantastic resource for teachers and pupils of all ages, especially if they’re working on a local history project. The historic layer is viewable against a range of modern map scales up to 1:10,000 scale. You can access the maps via a slider bar that allows the contemporary map to be gradually faded away to reveal the historic map. We’ are adding some new history and geography resources to accompany the layer, including looking at how coastlines have changed over the last 120 years.�
Pupils and teachers using Digimap for Schools can save and print maps at A4 and A3 size. The maps can be printed as a historical map, or combined with the modern map at different transparency settings as a merged image. The full set of annotation tools are available for use on the historic map, providing many opportunities to highlight changes.
Since Digimap for Schools launched in 2010, the service has been adopted by over 20% of secondary schools. 
NLSChris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at NLS said “Old maps present our history in one of its most enthralling forms. We are delighted to be collaborating with Ordnance Survey and EDINA in delivering our historic maps to schools through the Digimap for Schools application.�
Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA at the University of Edinburgh said “Students, pupils and their teachers now have unrivalled access to the very best maps to gain rich understanding of how Britain’s landscape has changed in over a century. The result is endlessly fascinating, the skill and generosity of staff at the National Library of Scotland have enabled a real sense of place when combined with the Ordnance Survey maps of today’s Britain.�

Digimap for Schools is open to all schools in Great Britain via an annual subscription. The subscription costs £69 for a primary school and up to £144 for a secondary school.

Registering for Digimap: Please check your email address

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Email IconOctober is the busiest time for welcoming new users to Digimap and we have already approved over 7500 registrations. As you know it is important to enter a valid email address when registering; this is how we send you a link to your data downloads and how we inform you of any changes or disruptions to the service.

We ask you to give us your academic email address where possible, we know for some this isn’t most commonly used address so please check that you have entered it correctly.  Quite often the email address entered seems correct but is missing a particular element, for example:

  • We get: j.bloggs@university.ac.uk
  • We need: j.bloggs@student.university.ac.uk

Please make sure that you don’t miss out any parts of the address, you can try sending yourself an email to see if it is right… and it is always worth another check for typos.

Thank you.

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FOSS4G – a developers review part 2

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Photo – Addy Pope

This is the second part of EDINA’s developer review of FOSS4G 2013.  This time it is Mike Gale who will be providing his opinion on what was presented.

Who are you:

Michael Gale – GIS Engineer / Member of the EDINA’s Data Team. My job is to essentially deal with the vast quantities of GIS data we utilise at EDINA. I translate, modify, split and twist the data we receive into types and formats that our services such as Digimap can then offer to our users. I heavily use the Swiss army knife – GIS command line tools of GDAL/OGR and additionally Safe FME, Shell Scripting, Python & PostGIS.

What you hoped to get out of the event?

To discover the latest and greatest ways to utilise the tools I already use. I was keen to evaluate what advances and benefits PostGIS 2.0 could offer – particularly with 3D data, LiDAR point clouds & pgRouting. Additionally I wanted to discover new ways of integrating Python into my workflows.
Top 3 things you saw at the event (not the food or beer….)

(1) Chris Tucker keynote – MapStory.org

MapStory.org is a new website that empowers a global user community to organise knowledge about the world spatially and temporally. It is essentially a social media platform where people can crowd source geospatial data and create “MapStories” with spatio-temporally enabled narratives. The best way to figure out what that all means is to check out the website!!

(2) Cartopy & Iris – Open Source Python Tools For Analysis and Visualisation – Dr Edward Campbell (Met Office)

Cartopy is a new python mapping library for the transformation and visualisation of geospatial vector and raster data. The library offers the ability for point, line, polygon and image transformations between projections and a way to visualise data with only a few snippets of python code. Iris is a python library that specifically deals with analysing and visualising meteorological and oceanographic datasets, particularly 3D and temporal data.

(3) LiDAR in PostgreSQL with Pointcloud – Paul Ramsey

PostGIS support for LiDAR data has been non-existent until now. Paul Ramsey has created a new spatial data type for PostGIS 2.0 that now offers the ability to import huge amounts of point cloud data, and additionally analyse the information with several new postgis functions. Pretty impressive.

(4) I’ll throw a comedy one in as well: “Up all night to get Mapping”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EEVYHUQlkU

Editors note: view at your own (ears) risk.

1 thing that you are definitely going to investigate further

The IRIS and Cartopy Python libraries.

Thanks Mike.  I hope to add another couple of review next week.  My overview, with links to as many reviews as i could find, can be found HERE.