Tens of thousands of students, staff and researchers at universities and further education colleges across Britain have online access to the country’s most advanced digital mapping from this month.
Ordnance Survey’s seamless representation of the detailed geography of Britain, OS MasterMap, is available to support learning and teaching at all institutions subscribing to the Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection service. Digimap is an online mapping and data delivery facility funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, and provided by the EDINA national data centre based at the University of Edinburgh.
Digimap enables users to download Ordnance Survey information – free at the point of use – into suitable application software on their own desktops. It has supported a vast range of studies, from archaeology to zoology, since its launch seven years ago.
The addition of OS MasterMap will potentially benefit nearly 32,000 registered Digimap users at 143 institutions, including more than 100 universities.
"Direct access to OS MasterMap opens enormous opportunities for learning and teaching in all disciplines," says Vanessa Lawrence, Ordnance Survey’s Director General and Chief Executive. "OS MasterMap is a continually updated comprehensive geographic framework relied on for all kinds of government and business decision making. Now we can extend its benefits into higher and further education for research, analysis, reports and presentations."
"The addition of OS MasterMap to our service offers a wonderful opportunity for our users," says David Medyckyi-Scott, Research & Geo-data Services Manager at EDINA. "Seamless geographic information offers an ideal means to integrate different data sources and help students and researchers open up new areas of study and expand existing ones. OS MasterMap can now be incorporated in teaching and learning materials, including course packs, lecture notes, presentations and virtual learning environments."
"JISC has made significant investments in the Digimap platform, which has been created specifically for the education community,” says Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections. “The continuation of the JISC subsidy enables colleges and universities to access millions of pounds worth of high-value and essential map data that would otherwise be beyond the means of most institutions. All of this, combined with the flexible licensing terms and conditions, allows the full enrichment of education and research."
The new information available through Digimap comes from the OS MasterMap Topography and Integrated Transport Network (ITN) Layers. The topographic data shows the position and extent of around half a billion features on the landscape. Users can visualise the most up-to-date context of buildings, land, water, roads and even non-physical features such as administrative boundaries. Each feature has a unique identifier known as a TOID, which makes it easy to link and associate different kinds of data to a specific geographic point. This is ideal for managing information in a database environment.
The ITN Layer is the most detailed geographic reference base for Great Britain’s road infrastructure. It includes more than 1.5 million items of routing information, such as height, weight and width restrictions; traffic calming; turn restrictions and one-way streets. Across industry and government, it offers a flexible, precise foundation for transport management systems, the coordination of street works and emergency planning.
In supporting the Digimap service, OS MasterMap will further enhance an online education resource that already supports studies in a diverse range of subject areas, including epidemiology, ecology, planning, geography, environmental studies, biology, sociology and civil engineering.
Digimap is governed under rigorous data security for registered users. More information is available at http://edina.ac.uk/
Source: Ordnance Survey