I’ve been dabbling in mapping systems for a while now, looking at how broadband and social data can be combined to better understand the nature of the digital divide, and to just simply understand what the broadband landscape really looks like.

For broadband information there is only one source of reliable primary data – Samknows.

For reliable social data the ONS is pretty good although finding exactly what you want can be a bit of chore  but  with the new data.gov.uk website this is only going to get better.

But at some point you need to combine all this information on a map. The UK and Ireland are fairly unique here in having a service that produces fantastically accurate and useful maps but the down side of this is that for most applications today this level of detail is rarely necessary but and the process is mind bogglingly expensive. The impact has been that I could find perfectly adequate maps of almost anywhere in the world to model my data but for a long time really struggled to find an affordable compromise in the UK.

I then started to use Openstreetmap – an opensource/creative commons mapping project which has through leaps and bounds got better and better. With the entire world held in a database on my machine I’m able to produce perfectly reasonable maps for most of the work I do – except in the most important areas I need to understand – rural areas. Openstreetmap relies on the goodwill of its supporters to trace using GPS the areas it maps – fewer people live in rural areas so naturally less of it is mapped well.

Its felt like the OS have fought to retain their right to charge very large sums to anyone wanting access to their data, regardless of the use and need, so it was with a sense of cynicism I decided to take a peek at the Ordinance Survey’s Opendata website launched last week – the place the OS have released some of their map information to the public.

There is only one word which really captured what I found:

WOW!!

There are geo-coded maps of various scales in glorious detail and superb quality ready to be loaded straight into my GIS tools.

There is a variety of GIS files which provide any number of other locational resources including parliamentary constituency boundaries, councils, the lot.

And there is a file which says where each and every postcode is

So like a child in a sweetshop I delved in, downloading all the files which I’d wanted for so long but had to cobble together from secondary sources – now I had them in the original form from the most respected map makers in the world.

But then a problem – one of the files, the one I really wanted containing postcode data, didn’t download. So I dropped the OS a line expecting an automated reply in a day or two, leading to some perfunctory reply in a few days to say it was really my fault and to try again.

How wrong – within a few minutes I got an apologetic mail from Jamie, one of their developers on their help desk, asking a few sensible questions and we exchanged a few more emails before his shift finished, when I got a new thread from Dr Paul who picked the problem up until it was fixed. It seems a bit of test data in their Goliath system had refused to be flushed from a cache somewhere which given the scale of their launch is a pretty minor problem.

The launch of the data is absolutely fantastic – their support during the launch is something else!

Hats off to the Ordinance Survey – I’m off to do some mapping!