Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
Digimap is an online map and data delivery service, available by subscription to UK Higher and Further Education establishments. Operated by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, Digimap offers a number of data collections, including Ordnance Survey, historical, geological, aerial photography, LiDAR, marine maps, land cover mapping, global mapping and census data. For more information about Digimap go to our website: https://digimap.edina.ac.uk Background image Contains OS data (c) Crown Copyright and database right 2022
Environment Digimap has been in service for around 4 months now and already has 63 subscribing institutions, over 6000 active users and has made over 35,000 screen maps.
We’d really like to know what you think of the newest Digimap Collection and what you want to see added or improved. Once you have used the service then please go to the following web page and fill in the short survey, it will take less than 10 minutes and will help the future development of Environment Digimap:
If your institution doesn’t subscribe to Environment Digimap yet you still have 4 months where the service is completely free. The following blog post has information on how to subscribe:
For information on how previous Digimap surveys have affected the survey please have a look at the Quality Improvement reports on EDINA’s Benefits of Services page:
We are often asked whether maps from Digimap may be used in submissions for planning applications. The answer is no. This applies to ALL planning applications, regardless of who submits them, to which authority and under what guise. This includes:
students submitting planning applications to a planning authority as part of coursework or work placement schemes
all private planning applications (commercial or residential)
institutions submitting planning applications for their own premises
members of staff who take on consultancy work involving the submission of planning applications
Maps and plans for planning applications can be purchased from many different suppliers. Promap is one such example. There is also a UK government website called the Planning Portal which can assist with plans and maps.
Ordnance Survey are running a one day event for people to show off their cartography skills; anyone who is able to take up a summer internship can apply.
Jenny Brooker, Prototyping Manager at Ordnance Survey writes:
We’ve come a long way since the days of drawing maps by hand but Cartography is still an integral part of our business, and is so much more than just making pretty maps.
We are inviting anyone with an interest in cartographic design or data visualisation to come to Carto Hack Camp and showcase their skills by spending the day with us visualising geographic data. The winner will be offered a paid summer internship in our cartographic design team.
What Will Happen at Carto Hack Camp?
Our camp will be a day-long opportunity for anyone to visit our headquarters in Southampton, meet our Product Development team and spend the day working with them to come up with an exciting new solution for one of our customer scenarios.
There will be a choice of three different customer scenarios, designed to suit a wide range of backgrounds and abilities. The work will be similar in nature to that carried out by our cartographic design consultants. Find out more about what they do here.
You will then demo your ‘map’ to our panel of Ordnance Survey judges who will rate them and decide on the day’s winner.
Why Should I Get Involved?
It’s an opportunity for anyone with skills and an interest in cartographic design to innovate, create and collaborate with other like-minded people.
Our aim is for an enjoyable, relaxed and pressure-free day. Such an atmosphere will hopefully promote good design and if you want to take it a step further, we will be offering the hack day winner a paid summer internship in the Ordnance Survey Cartographic Design team.
Internship
As a part of the British Cartographic Society’s 50th anniversary celebrations last summer, Ordnance Survey announced that we would offer a paid summer internship for a six to nine week period during 2014 in our cartographic design team. The winner of the hack camp will be offered the opportunity to take up this internship.
Where is it?
We will be setting up camp in the business centre at our own headquarters, Explorer House on the edge of Southampton.
When is it?
Thursday 20th February 2014.
9:30 am – Breakfast
10 am – Introduction
1pm – Lunch.
5pm – Round up of the day and judging.
6pm – Finish
What do I Need?
You need a keen interest in cartographic design or data visualisation and preferably some relevant skills but we welcome applicants from any background. You can bring along your own equipment and software, internet access will be provided. If you don’t have your own equipment laptops can be provided on request (please email cartodesign@ordnancesurvey.co.uk with your requirements prior to the event).
How Much Does it Cost?
The event is free and we will provide complimentary food and drink. All we ask is for your time and for you to arrange your own way of getting here.
All Digimap services will be unavailable between 08:30 and 10:00 on Tuesday 28th of January, and should be considered “at risk” for the rest of the morning. We are carrying out an essential database upgrade, this affects logging into the service so there will be no access until the work is complete. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Ancient Roam in Historic Digimap has had its print options updated so it now has the same set of options as the other Roam facilities. The two big changes to note are that you can now print up to A0 and that you can print a single county in areas where several overlap.
Until this change was made it was impossible to print an area with overlapping maps without printing all the counties available rather than just the one(s) you were viewing on the screen. Any print files now generated in areas with overlapping counties will only show those which are displayed on screen. This allows you to have the control over how much information is on your map and to make the decision to show more or less information.
Sometimes it can be an advantage to show multiple counties as even though the sheets overlap the actual map information doesn’t. However in the example above you can see how the counties overwrite each other in the map on the left and so produce a very confusing and fairly useless result; by switching one county off you can produce a much clearer print map such as the one on the right. [Click on the images above to view larger versions of the maps.]
The ability to print maps up to A0 brings Ancient Roam into line with the other Roam facilities so you can now print at this very large size in any Digimap collection.
EDINA currently uses the time between 17:30 and 18:30 on Tuesdays as its “At Risk” period for carrying out service maintenance to Digimap. From January 2014 we will be changing this to a morning slot, between 08:30 and 09:30 on Tuesdays, allowing us more time to resolve any issues that may arise due to the scheduled work.
Increasingly the maintenance work has been causing less and less disruption to the service as we are able to switch to different servers. Moving to a morning downtime allows us to further minimise any potential disruption because staff are more readily on hand during normal working hours.
We hope that this change doesn’t cause any disruption to our users, please let us know if you have any concerns:
EDINA has updated the most detailed maps in Geology Digimap to the latest version from the British Geological Survey (BGS). The 1:50,000 scale maps and data in Geology Roam and Geology Download are now the DiGMapGB-50 Version 7 data from the BGS.
The main differences between this data and the previous versions is that there is an extra tile of data in Wales, EW150 Dinas Mawddwy, and that the linear features are now contained in a single shapefile rather than being in several separate layers. The 7 different linear feature layers; Alteration, Fault, Fold Axis, Fossil Horizon, Landform, Mineral Vein, and Rock are now all combined in a single Linear layer.
The following tiles have all undergone major changes:
Scotland
SC008E_Loch Doon (Superficial)
SC016E_Ettrick (Bedrock)
SC073W_Invermoriston (Superficial)
SC084E_Nairn (Bedrock)
SC092E_Loch Fannich (Bedrock)
SC101E_Ullapool (Superficial)
SC102W_Oykel Bridge (Bedrock)
SC108W_Ben Hee (Bedrock)
England & Wales
EW039 Kendal (Superficial)
EW075 Preston
EW085 Manchester
EW086 Glossop
EW100 Sheffield
EW112 Chesterfield
EW150 Dinas Mawddwy
EW167 Dudley
EW174 Thetford
EW203 Bedford
EW224 242 Colchester Brightlingsea
EW247 Swansea
EW265 Bath
EW283 Andover
EW310 Tiverton
EW346 Newquay
For more details about the 1:50,000 and other DiGMapGB datasets you can download the Information Notes directly from the BGS: DiGMapGB Information Notes
We are often asked whether Ordnance Survey maps from Digimap can be published on the web and whether the Digimap licence allows this. The simple answer is yes, but there are (as always) caveats. The most obvious one is that any maps from Digimap that you publish on a website must relate to your academic work. That applies to the use of Digimap, regardless of what you do with the maps or the service.
The section of the Ordnance Survey Licence you need to look at is Schedule 2 of the Second Variation Agreement. This was originally called Appendix 4 under the original 2007 – 2009 licence, but has since been superseded by the first and second variations. You can find all the licence documents online here:
If you wish to publish a static image on your public-facing, “open to the world” website, you may do so on condition that the image is no bigger than 1 048 576 pixels. This is the equivalent of a square 1024 x 1024 pixels.
If you wish to publish a static image on an intranet page, that is, a website with access restricted to members of your institution, there are no restrictions on the size of the image you can use.
You can publish as many images as you wish, as long as each one is less than 1 048 657 pixels (1024 x 1024 or equivalent).
Interactive Mapping
A more common and complex question is whether you can put up a “zoomable” map with your own data overlaid on it. If this is what you wish to do, you need to consider the following stipulations in the licence:
When rendering mapping on a website:
Only Digital Maps may be published. Digital Data and mapping in GeoPDF format may not be published at any time.
It must only be available as an image and not be accompanied by drawing or measuring tools.
It is permissible to zoom in and out to enlarge or reduce the viewing scale of a discrete map image but not to change from one dataset to another of higher/lower resolution.
It is permissible to pan to the edge of a discrete map image (where the ‘viewing frame’ is smaller than the overall image).
Digital Maps may be displayed at any size on screen.
More than one Digital Map may be included but no single Digital Map may be of a size greater than specified above.
Note that “Digital Maps” is a capitalised term and is specifically defined in the licence agreement. The definition given is: “any or all of the maps created by a Datacentre from the Licensed Work to be used in a Service provided by a Datacentre.” In essence this means any map created by Digimap which is “non intelligent”. That is, it contains no vector data, cannot be interrogated to extract data of any sort (in the same way as one might interrogate a satellite image to identify the spectral signature of a particular pixel), and is a dumb image.
Given these stipulations, you are not permitted to use the Ordnance Survey licensed data available through Digimap to display a series of maps using different OS data products which the public can zoom in and out of, pan around the whole country and add their own markers to, in a similar way to many other online mapping services (such as Google Maps or Apple Maps or OpenStreetmap). Note that this does not apply if you wish to use the OS OpenData, which is also available through Digimap.
Alternative Sources of Mapping
If you do wish to create an interactive mapping function on your website, you might like to consider the alternatives to using licensed Ordnance Survey data. EDINA operates a free service called OpenStream which provides OS OpenData through an API. You need an academic email address to register for OpenStream (ending .ac.uk) , but it doesn’t cost. The maps area available under the OS OpenData licence and the licensing terms are therefore much more flexible than the data licensed through Digimap.
As ever, if you have any questions about what you can and cannot do under the Digimap licence, please do not hesitate to contact EDINA with details of what you wish to do, what data you wish to use and who you intend should benefit from your work. We are keen to hear of licensing questions you would like to see explained further on this blog.
EDINA and Jisc are pleased to announce the launch of a new Digimap Collection, Environment Digimap.
This new collection offers land cover map data from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH). Environment Digimap is a subscription service; however, it will be available free of charge until 31 July 2014. After this period a subscription fee will apply per institution.
Environment Digimap offers two facilities: mapping through Environment Roam, and the ability to download data through Environment Download. The data available, CEH’s Land Cover Map products, provide a snapshot of land cover for each of the years 1990, 2000 and 2007. There are raster datasets available at 25m and 1km resolutions for each year and a vector version of the 2000 dataset. The data are in a range of formats depending on the year. More details are available in the Environment Digimap Help Pages: CEH Products Available
How to get access…
To use this service for free your institution needs to subscribe, this is free till the end of the 2013 – 14 academic year and can be arranged via the Jisc Collections website:
If your institution doesn’t subscribe the Environment Digimap button on the home page will be grey. Contact your Digimap site rep and they will be able to help arrange your institutions subscription: List of Digimap Site Reps
If you have any questions about Environment Digimap, please contact us:
Author: 
We’d really like to know what you think of the newest Digimap Collection and what you want to see added or improved. Once you have used the service then please go to the following web page and fill in the short survey, it will take less than 10 minutes and will help the future development of Environment Digimap:
