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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
May has been a busy month for data updates in OS Data Download. Not only have we released Points of Interest, Urban Paths and MasterMap Sites Layer, but a number of other datasets have also been updated.
The latest version of Boundary-Line includes new datasets for Welsh Wards, Historical Counties, and Ceremonial Counties. Plus the data is now available in TAB format which is great news for MapInfo users. You can read more about these changes in this blog post.
The table below lists all the datasets that have been updated and includes the OS release date:
An introduction to the day from Professor David Maguire, Jisc Chair, Vice principle of the University of Greenwich, former chief scientist at Esri and an acknowledged expert in computer mapping and geographic information systems.
A talk given by Ordnance Survey about their cartographic principles and how they apply them when designing the visual representations for features on their maps.
A presentation given by architecture and design staff and students from Ravensbourne showcasing the physical models they have been producing using or inspired by Digimap maps and data.
A round-up of all the things you need to know about from the recently updated Ordnance Survey licence.
University of Greenwich Queen Anne Court
As well as these presentations we will have our data and software suppliers present to tell you about their new and up coming products such as OS Open Map data, BGS Groundhog & ArcGIS Pro. We will also be bringing you up to date with all the new developments at EDINA and taking you outside in the impressive grounds of the old Royal Naval College to have a look at some new developments with EDINA’s Fieldtrip App.
Finally there will be time for you to chat with people from all the other institutions about how they support and promote geospatial data and software, there are already over 50 people registered to attend with over 25 different institutions represented so far.
If you haven’t booked your place yet then please do so soon, places will be limited:
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 inform you of current geospatial developments at EDINA and the wider community. It is also an opportunity to give EDINA feedback on the services we provide and discuss geospatial issues with the team.
Full details of this years event will and the programme will appear on the website when available:
This year Ordnance Survey’s cartography team will be telling us about how they go about creating cartographic representations of the map data. We’ll also be showcasing the work of students of architecture and urban design, highlighting how data from Digimap is crucial to their studies.
The conference will be located in the historical Queen Anne Court at the University of Greenwich, part of the Old Royal Naval College. In such surroundings we hope the weather will allow us to go outside for an afternoon excursion where we can show you the enhancements to our Fieldtrip mobile app while exploring the area. We will also be highlighting the many new datasets that have been added to Digimap over the recent months and giving you a sneak preview of what we will be doing over the summer to improve all the geoservices offered by EDINA.
The conference is free to attend and runs from 10:00 till 16:15, for all the details and to book your place please visit the conference website: GeoForum 2015
Please contact us if you have any questions:
Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
Phone: 0131 650 3302
Find out what happened at last year’s event: GeoForum 2014
We have moved the Dudley Stamp Land Use Survey maps from the Historic Digimap Collection to their more natural home in Environment Roam. In doing so we have increased their usability. You can now pan and zoom much more easily and can print and annotate the maps, something that was not available in the previous Land Use Map Viewer.
Two scales of map are available for all of England, Scotland and Wales: 1:625,000 and 1:63,360.
Environment Roam automatically switches between these at the appropriate point when zooming in or out of the map.
To view the 1930s maps go to the Basemaps selector on the right hand side of Environment Roam and choose Dudley Stamp 1930s from the drop down window.
Ordnance Survey’s most detailed open data product, Open Map – Local, is now available to download from the Digimap service along with the OS Open Names gazetteer, OS Open Rivers water network and OS Open Roads road network. There are no restrictions on what the data can be used for, it just needs to carry a simple copyright acknowledgement:
This is a vector dataset best viewed at a scale of 1:10,000, with layers including buildings, roads, sites, railways, hydrology, coastline, woodland and cartographic text. The data comes in Shapefile format for easy access in the most commonly used GIS software.
The data isn’t quite as feature rich as the licensed VectorMap Local data, though it does contain some nice additions such as the ability to highlight public buildings and their grounds.
OS Open Names
This is a gazetteer with 2.5 million entries, made up of over 870,000 named and numbered roads, nearly 44,000 settlements and over 1.6 million postcodes. This dataset is billed as the comprehensive list of Great Britain’s place names, road names and numbers and postcodes, and is certainly the most detailed gazetteer in Digimap. The data is available in CSV or GML formats.
OS Open Rivers
This is a generalised network view of the rivers of Great Britain. The data is designed to give its users a high-level view of where the water flows across the land surface. Though it doesn’t show the detail of the actual width or shape of the river as the topographic data it is a proper network. This means it doesn’t get interrupted by bridges or other features that prevent the topographic data from being used to “route” water through the river network. The data is available in Shapefile and GML formats.
OS Open Roads
Like OS Open Rivers this is a generalised network of roads. Topographic data will provide more detail about the road dimensions and real world position, however this data provides an uninterrupted network for road routing analysis. The data is available in Shapefile and GML formats.
As part of our work to demonstrate the value for money of the Digimap Collections, EDINA has calculated the commercial cost of all the data downloaded and maps created for printing. We calculated the values per institution for the period August 2013 to July 2014 then totalled them; this came to approximately £65.4 million. This estimate is a conservative one because we reduce the quantity of data downloaded by 60% to account for duplication. When all the maps printed and data downloaded were included in the calculation (i.e assuming users would continue to take their own data and maps, and not share them) this total rises to over £107 million.
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We know that some data is downloaded multiple times within an institution, for example by students for a class exercise or by researchers for specific study sites. We found that on average only 40% of the data taken from Digimap over a period of time was unique within an institution. We believe that if institutions were paying commercial rates for their data they would be more likely to download it once and circulate it to those who need it; this is why we reduce the amount of data included in our calculation. However, there is considerable variation between institutions as to how much is unique; those that do more research or are smaller in size tend to have a greater proportion of unique downloads, so we calculated the 100% figure as a ceiling value.
In total, over the past four academic years over £306 million (£170 million at 40%) worth of print maps and data has been served up from Digimap to subscribing institutions. The steep increase in 2013-14 was caused by more Ordnance Survey products being downloaded and printed than ever before and also by the high commercial costs of several products added to the Geology Digimap service.
How the Costs are Calculated
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The costs used in our calculations for the data come from the list prices published by data suppliers, and include any relevant multipliers or discounts declared publicly on their websites.
The data costs we calculated are done on a per product / per institution basis, with the data preparation and licensing charges assigned only once per product, per institution (rather than per data request). Many of the data collections are commercially licensed based on the number of users who have access to the data; with increasing numbers of users a multiplier is applied to a base cost. We applied the relevant multipliers according to the number of active registered users for each Collection at an institution.
We capped data costs at the price of national coverage for each product, making it impossible to assign greater cost for any one product than it would be to supply the entire dataset for use by a whole institution.
The values for the print maps (including saved maps in all Roam applications) are calculated by finding the cheapest commercially available map prints from websites such as eMapsite, NLS and FiND.
What We Didn’t Include
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No monetary values were assigned to the millions of screen maps that are produced from Digimap. The value calculated also doesn’t take into account any of the help materials, training courses and support facilities that are all part of the Digimap service.
No OpenData downloads or maps created from OpenData are included in the calculation, despite the advantages of producing them from Digimap rather than other websites.
However, the biggest saving that isn’t included in these value calculations is your time. We only charged the data supplier’s preparation and licensing costs once per product or order, in line with each company’s policy where it applied. In reality there would be many orders occurring throughout an academic year as new research questions are raised. This all costs time, time which the data suppliers will charge for or that institutional staff would have to take to submit requests for data and time for staff to create and manage a repository for spatial data.
With 24 hour access to high quality data and maps through a purpose built mapping and data download interface, Digimap does all this work for its subscribers.
Over the coming weeks we will be sending out each institution’s data cost calculations to Digimap site representatives. If you are interested in the commercial costs of the maps and data your institution has been using please contact your site represenative. If you are unsure who your site representative is, please contact us:
Today, on the 15th day of 2015, we mark 15 years of running Digimap!
This week in 2000 the Digimap national service was launched following a four year project phase.
We marked the first 10 years with an event in January 2010 a great day which summarised the first decade in some detail: Read about it here
A recent presentation given at the Royal Geographical Society Annual conference highlighted the growth of the service and more recent developments: View it on SlideShare
The service is more embedded in UK academia than ever before, in use at 160 universities and colleges with over 58,000 registered users at those institutions. As well as this we now have bespoke versions for Colleges and Schools. Over the 15 years we have registered almost 500,000 users to access the collections and they in turn have generated nearly 100 million screen maps and 3 million print maps. In terms of the value for money, during academic year 2012/13 alone, the conservative total for products downloaded or printed from all Digimap collections was nearly £44 million a figure that grows year on year.
Improvements to Digimap continue with several exciting developments already lined up in early 2015.
We have a series of workshops (More Details) as part of rolling programme of outreach which includes conferences and other events. Keep up to date on the following page: http://digimap.blogs.edina.ac.uk/events/
We continue to work closely with colleagues at Jisc in providing the Maps and geospatial data offering http://jisc.ac.uk/content/maps as well as with the Ordnance Survey directly for the data underpinning the service.
Update 12/02/2015:The contents of this blog post have been moved to the Digimap Help system and can be found at the following location (link opens in a new window):
OS MasterMap® 1:2,000 Raster draped on top of OS Terrain™ 50, with buildings from OS MasterMap® Topography Layer extruded on top using Building Height Attribute data.
Update 12/02/2015:The contents of this blog post have been moved to the Digimap Help system and can be found at the following location (link opens in a new window):
OS VectorMap® Local Raster draped on top of OS Terrain™ 50, with buildings from OS MasterMap® Topography Layer Building Height Attribute and Positioned Non Coniferous Trees extruded on top
To get the most from OS MasterMap data it is usually best to convert it from its supplied format, GML, to a format better suited to the software you are going to use it in. For our CAD users Digimap has been offering the DWG format for several months (see previous blog post); now we are offering a format that makes the data easier to use in GIS software.
Although Shapefile is still the most commonly requested GIS format it cannot handle the large file sizes (over 2GB) that could be requested from the Data Download service; an area of 100km2 in an urban centre would exceed this limit. We therefore turned to the File Geodatabase format that works in the two most commonly used GIS software applications, ArcGIS and QGIS. There is more information about Geodatabases on Wikipedia here: Wikipedia -ArcGIS Geodatabase
To select the File Geodatabase format, add some MasterMap to your basket in Data Download. Once in the basket you can click the down arrow in the Format column and change it from the default GML to File Geodatabase:
Geodatabase formats are the recommended formats for use in ArcGIS software, being the most efficient for data storage and analysis. The format supports the use of .lyr files for styling the data and EDINA has provided some for the MasterMap data downloaded from Digimap.
The data can be added to a map in ArcGIS and QGIS in the usual way, though in QGIS you need to use Add vector layer –> Directory rather than a Database as you may assume.
Styling information for both ArcGIS and QGIS has been provided by EDINA in .lyr and QML formats, these can be found at the bottom of Digimap’s help page for OS MasterMap. These representations give enough information to view the data in a style that OS MasterMap is commonly viewed in. The help page also contains a link to the official Ordnance Survey SLD styling information, please see the PDF that comes with the SLD files for information on how to use them.
