OpenStreetMap
The site is a very slow at the moment (no surprise), but the Great Britain OS OpenData has come on-stream:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/
License here:
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/licence/docs/licence.pdf
Data downloads here:
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendatadownload/products.html
Discussion
Comment from David Martin on 1 April 2010 at 12:09
Is the license compatible with importing this into OSM?
Comment from Mezzanine on 1 April 2010 at 12:49
I'm no legal expert.
It looks like using the data directly (eg. importing the Post Codes or street names) requires creative commons attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). I don't know if that's a show-stopper for OSM.
Using the data indirectly (eg. for tracing or reference purposes) may require attribution at the point of reference only. If so, I imagine the mapping could be pulled into potlatch as a background layer and derived work would be license-free.
Comment from Richard on 1 April 2010 at 14:16
Lots of discussion of this on the talk-gb list and on IRC. In brief: licence probably compatible, but we don't want to just do an unthinking import and stomp all over what's already there.
Comment from David Martin on 1 April 2010 at 16:44
OK. I understand the necessity to not destroy what already exists. However, I'm sitting here looking at Perthshire and Angus and working out how many calories it would take to just trace half the minor roads on the bike in the blank spaces on the map. Integrating OS data would be much faster. Any chance it could be imported on an area by area basis, with appropriate curation tools? JOSM plugin?
O, for the short term, can we use the OS raster maps as a basis for tracing?
Comment from Richard on 1 April 2010 at 16:57
A few of us will hopefully be working on getting the rasters in as a traceable layer this weekend.
One of the challenges with importing the data is we don't know what's coming in a month's time. What we have today is Meridian2, which is useful but (on average) much more generalised than standard OSM quality, so can look pretty angular. In May, OS will be releasing VectorMap District for free, which may be significantly better. But no-one's seen it!
Comment from mapperz on 1 April 2010 at 22:10
VectorMap is in GML - https://www.ordnancesurveyvectormap.com/howItWorks/
OS VectorMap™ Local is a national vector dataset supplied in Geography Markup Language (GML). It has been derived from OS Landplan data and has been generalised to view between scales of 1:3000 to 1:20,000.
It is cleaner and better than Meridian2 (fake roads!)
But agree that Meridian2 as background raster/trace is worthy of implementation especially for rural areas of England, Scotland & Wales.
But OSM data should persevered as is and not replaced by it.
suggest at Road Name checking comparison option?
Comment from Ollie on 2 April 2010 at 01:02
My thinking is....
VectorMap District will be the best thing to trace from - although we haven't seen it yet so we don't know! VectorMap Local is even better but is not part of OS OpenData so we can't use that. VectorMap District might just be a generalised version of VectorMap Local - we shall see.
In the meantime, StreetView will be the next best option to trace from, but requires some heavy duty raster manipulation to produce a set of tiles we can start to trace from.
Meridian2 is probably the worst of the four - it is really angular and has a slightly bizarre tendency to collapse city squares to a point: http://gibin.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~ollie/osopendata/meridian/?zoom=17&lat=51.49907&lon=-0.15297&layers=BT - however it may still be of some use for tracing, e.g. for woodland cover and filling in street names (it does seem to be a few years out of date in places though. E.g. the A-road through the Olympic Park is not in it, but the housing estate nearby that got bulldozed at the same time is still on it.
Comment from Wynndale on 2 April 2010 at 11:15
The alternative to raster manipulations would be to follow the French Cadastre plugin and edit in the Ordnance Survey projection.
Comment from marscot on 2 April 2010 at 19:19
yeah it will be great to has this extra data to help fill in gaps, but remember os data has errors in it too, a visit in person is still better I would say.
os errors I have found are Pylons on wrong side of roads, Hills with wrong names and heights ect.