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
CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops has been produced by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in partnership with Remote Sensing Applications Consultants and provides annually updated arable crop information for the whole of Great Britain. You can read more about it in our previous blog post.
You can find the 2018 data under the Basemaps in Environment Roam and under the Crop Data heading in Environment Download.
Last week we granted access to two new Digimap collections for all registered Digimap users. All Digimap users now have access to Global Digimap and Society Digimap. You should have received an email about this on Thursday 21st March.
The free trial will run until 31st July 2019. Access beyond that date will require your institution to have a subscription.
Global Digimap offers three datasets for mapping and data download: Open Street Map, Natural Earth and Collins Bartholomew World Panorama maps.
We are really keen to know what you think of the service and the data available. You can complete our online feedback form to tell us. We can’t answer questions submitted through this form; please contact our helpdesk if you need assistance.
Society Digimap offers a wealth of census and socio-economic data for Great Britain. This includes over 40 layers of data from a range of 2011 Census data, broadband availability and Output Area Classification (OAC). The complexity of census data is sometimes off-putting, despite the tremendous insights it can offer. Society Digimap aims to provide easy access to some key variables as an introduction to these complex data.
We are still working on providing a Data Download facility and a print facility for Society Roam, among other things. If you have suggestions on what else you would like to see in Society Digimap, we’d love to hear your views through our online feedback form. Please note that we cannot respond to queries submitted through this feedback form. If you need help, please get in touch: digimap@ed.ac.uk
We are very pleased to share our provisional programme for this year’s GeoForum event on Thursday 28th February 2019 at Lancaster House, Lancaster University, LA1 4GJ.
GeoForum is a free all day event aimed at lecturers, researchers and support staff who promote and support the use of geospatial data and services at their institution. Throughout the day we there will be talks and demonstrations to showcase recent geospatial developments at EDINA and opportunity to offer your feedback on the services we provide and discuss geospatial issues with the EDINA team.
This beautiful new addition to Global Digimap is an excellent addition providing a wonderful cartographic product ideal for small scale extents.
EDINA feel this addition, available via it’s ‘Alternate Base Map’ function is a perfect enhancement to the collection. With it’s origins in The Times Atlas, World Panorama exemplifies what is best about a mapping product where cartographic presentation is at the fore. With a geopolitical committee sitting behind the product, providing input on boundaries and territory disputes it is the epitome of an authoritative dataset. This provides excellent comparison to OpenStreetMap, a massive crowd-sourced dataset of volunteered geographic information.
Available as a raster product and still to be added to Data Download, EDINA are keen to hear if this mapping product is attractive to you as a core offering in Global Digimap. If you have any comments about this new addition, please do let us know using the details below.
Webinar
We are running another short webinar on Global Digimap on Wednesday 9 January from 13:00-13:30 where we will showcase the new dataset as well as talk about the latest developments and additions to the service. There will also be plenty of opportunity to ask any questions you may have about the service and suggest any improvements you would like to see. Places are limited, so please register using the link below if you wish to attend:
As advertised earlier this year, the previous versions of Roam and Data Download will be withdrawn from service on 8th December 2018.
Since we understand that transition from one version to another takes time, both new and old versions have been running in parallel for many months now. The upgraded Roam and Data Download applications have been available since November 2017 and June 2018 respectively. These are both easier to use, more flexible on a range of devices and offer a more modern, slick user experience. Feedback on both has been very positive. Full instructions on how to use the new applications are available in the Digimap help pages. The data available remains identical.
New versions of Roam and Data Download
We continue to work to improve the facilities Digimap offers and hope to have some new developments avaliable over the coming months. If you have any questions about the withdrawal of the two older applications or any feedback or requests regarding the new applications, please do not hesitate to contact us.
We are very pleased to confirm the date and venue for our next GeoForum event and invite you to join us for an interesting programme, with a range of speakers and opportunities for discussion.
Please do save the date. We hope to focus on the recent addition of the CEH Land Cover Plus: Crops dataset to Environment Digimap, Global Digimap and the OpenStreetMap data as well as mapping data for Northern Ireland.
GeoForum is a free all day event aimed at lecturers, researchers and support staff who promote and support the use of geospatial data and services at their institution. Throughout the day we there will be talks and demonstrations to showcase recent geospatial developments at EDINA and opportunity to offer your feedback on the services we provide and discuss geospatial issues with the EDINA team. The confirmed programme will be posted here when available.
We are delighted to announce that Environment Digimap now offers the CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops dataset. CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops has been produced by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in partnership with Remote Sensing Applications Consultants and provides annually updated arable crop information for the whole of Great Britain.
Environment Digimap is the only platform dedicated to the academic sector offering this data. CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops data is available for both 2016 and 2017. Environment Digimap’s Roam application has the new datasets displayed as alternative basemaps, allowing you to compare the two years side by side using the “2-up” map function. The opacity slider also enables the underlying context map to be viewed easily.
The Info Tool also enables you to query the Crops data, giving information about the crop name, code, the polygon identifier and the coordinates of the point chosen. All other functions in Roam operate as usual, including the ability to annotate measure and print. The Map Content is also available in the left hand panel to help you identify crop types.
The CEH Land Cover® Plus: Crops data is also available to download from Environment Download. Select your area of interest as usual, add the Crop data to your basket and select from File Geodatabase or GeoPackage as optional formats. You can also choose to select individual crop layers rather than the full suite if you wish.
If your institution has a subscription to Environment Digimap, this dataset is available at no additional charge. If your institution does not have a subscription to Environment Digimap, prices and details of the subscription process can be found on our website.*
*Please note that in order to place a subscription order you must be a suitably authorised member of staff. If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Any user of Marine Digimap might be interested in this workshop, being held in London by our marine data partner, OceanWise Ltd. We are pleased to be able to share this opportunity with you. If you’re interested in attending, please contact OceanWise directly (contact details below).
OceanWise are running their popular Marine Data Management and GIS Workshop on 27th November 2018
This free event is back and is bigger and better than ever covering ‘What is data and why should we care’? ‘Why should data be seen as infrastructure?’ ‘Smart Ports – a myth or reality?’.
Join industry experts, share your experiences and learn how GIS technologies can successfully deliver savings in time, effort and money. Take part in the debate on open data and network with contacts from a range of industries and sectors.
OceanWise Ltd is an independent company specialising in all aspects of marine environmental data acquisition, data and knowledge management and GIS providing customers with comprehensive and cost effective end-to-end marine and coastal data management and decision support including:
We are very pleased to announce that we we recently added WMS (Web Map Service) functionality to all Digimap Roam applications. This new facility allows you to pull in map data from a whole host of publicly accessible services allowing you to visualise a wealth of data in the familiar Digimap Roam interface. This is beta functionality, and there are a few areas that need further improvement but we were keen to get it out there as quickly as possible so that you could start making use of it. Whilst we continue to work on the functionality, we welcome any feedback you may have. Our contact details can be found at the bottom of this post.
The WMS functionality can be found in the Overlays menu panel on the left hand side:
To add a WMS feed to your map you need to press the Add WMS Feed button, which will bring up the following window:
You will need to paste the getCapabilities URL in to the ‘3rd Party WMS URL’ field at the top of the popup. This URL is usually in the following format, but may be different depending on the service:
Having entered the URL the Get Layers button should become active, press this to retrieve all the layers available via the entered WMS URL. Finally add the layers to your map using the Add Layers to Map button to add them to your current map window. You can then control the opacity of each layer using the appropriate opacity slider and the order they are displayed by clicking and dragging. It’s possible to edit the names displayed e.g. to choose shorter names that are easier to see by pressing the edit button next to each entry:
There are numerous WMS available for the UK, many of which are listed on data.gov.uk. The image below shows listed buildings (boundaries and category) published by Historic Environment Scotland on top of the 1st Edition 1:2500 County Series map published in 1896 in Ancient Roam:
Listed buildings pulled via WMS on top of historic map from 1896 in Historic Roam
There are also lots of WMS available that serve up global data and can be viewed using the latest Global Digimap collection. One example of this is the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), shown below in Global Roam centred on the Gulf of Mexico:
Bathymetric data via WMS on top of OpenStreetMap data in Global Roam
We have put together a help page which lists examples of a variety of WMS from different sources. Whilst we can’t guarantee that they will all work all of the time if you do come across a WMS that you think should work and have tested that it works in other software, such as QGIS or ArcGIS Online, please let us know so we can improve the service.
Known issues
As mentioned above, this is new betafunctionality and as such there are a number of known issues and things to bear in mind:
Currently no warning messages are displayed if a WMS fails to load. If the data has not appeared after a reasonable period of time please try to access the data via the same URL in QGIS or ArcGIS Online. If the data does load in QGIS or ArcGIS Online please send the URL to us so we can investigate.
In some cases the Get Layers button will not return any layers. When this happens it is worth copying and pasting the text displayed if you visit the getCapabilities URL in a browser window in to the Advanced box.
WMS data is not included in print files.
It is not currently possible to edit the details of a WMS service or dataset names in IE11 as the wrapping in the edit window is not quite correct.
Some WMS URLs (including those published by the Environment Agency) are published with the HTTP prefix but in order for these to work in Digimap Roam you need to change the prefix to HTTPS instead.
The WMS must be able to supply data in the same projection of the current Roam application. All Roam applications use the British National Grid with the exception of Chart Roam and Global Roam which both use WGS84 Web Mercator. No warning is given if the WMS projection is not compatible with the current Roam application.
WMS entries in the Overlays panel are persistent between log-ins in the same browser, so if you add a WMS in Chrome, the same WMS entries will be available the following day in Chrome providing the browser cache/temporary storage has not been cleared overnight.
WMS entries added in one Roam application are also automatically available in all other Roam applications e.g. if you add a WMS in OS Roam it will also be available in Historic Roam etc.
There is no Get Feature information displayed for a WMS layer so you cannot click on a feature and get its attribute information. However the Legend for the layer is displayed in the WMS panel if you expand the layer.
Get in touch
If you have any questions or comments about the new functionality please do not hesitate to get in touch; our contact details are below:
