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
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.
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):
EDINA’s Geoforum 2014 was a great success with an audience of around 80 delegates and EDINA staff all enjoying an informative and entertaining programme. The aim of the event was to engage with users and support staff and highlight new features in EDINA’s core Jisc funded services.
There is a Storify of all the tweets about the conference here: Geoforum 2014 Storify
Keynote Address
Peter Gibbs is a well known for his BBC and Met Office weather forecasts and in his presentation he showed us the work that was being done by the Met Office and Environment Agency in combining their data and resources to predict not just where there is going to be rain but where the rain is likely to cause flooding.
Peter has a keen interest in improving public levels of understanding of science through better communication and this was very evident in his presentation. He managed to explain the complexities of how weather data was collected and used for forecasting in a very accessible way, leaving the audience with a much better understanding of how our weather and in particular flooding is predicted. We also got to see just how much data the met office use, up to 70 recordings at different heights for grid cells up to 1km2.
A key message implied in Peter’s talk was the critical importance of be able to create usable and appropriate information for your audience from the large amounts of complex and varied data available. This is something that as scientists we should all aspire to.
Data Usage
The next presentation came from a recent MSc in GIS Graduate, Darius Bazazi. The presentation followed on from the keynote nicely as it show how various datasets, some from Digimap, some from other sources, were combined to improve the science behind panning natural measures to control flooding. The slides for this presentation are available here:
The main issue tackled by Darius was to improve a key variable that decides whether an area is suitable for natural flood management, PROPWET (the proportion of time soils are wet). Darius used datasets such as the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s Landcover data to try and improve this value, bringing in vegetation cover and land use as factors that could influence it.
Darius’ talk showed how important the availability of data from a wide range of sources is key to research such as his. A large amount of researchers time, from graduate level upwards, can be taken up by finding and requesting / ordering data; Digimap and other geoservices from EDINA exist largely to reduce or eliminate the wait for data.
Support
Carol Blackwood finished off the morning’s presentations with a talk about the improvements EDINA are making to the support of their geoservices. The slides for this presentation can be found here:
Carol first told us about the work under way to replace the registration system for the Digimap collections. The main piece of good news is that there will no longer be a wait between registering and accessing the service. The new system will use the familiar email confirmation link to allow access once the registration form has been filled in. This will ensure that users have speedier access and also that their email is correct for collecting their downloaded data.
Carol also highlighted a few other things we are doing to support our users and also to improve the information available for site reps to promote Digimap. Firstly there is the new live chat system that allows people to have a text chat with the user support team. The chat window can be accessed from any of the help pages or the resource centre where it appears as a pop-up:
Finally Carol talked about the training offered by the Geosupport team, if you are interested in attending or hosting a training course then please get in touch with us: edina@ed.ac.uk. We can also arrange to do some bespoke training workshops or webinars for certain subject areas.
Lunch
During the lunch break we were treated to some delicious food and got to see some interesting data and software from the following people.
Most importantly we were given plenty of time to speak to others at the event, sharing ideas and thoughts on the presentations and demonstrations we had seen.
Service Updates
Guy McGarva brought us up-to-date with all the latest additions and enhancements made to Digimap over the past year, and then went on to highlight the improvements we will be introducing next. The slides for this presentation can be found here:
Guy showed how we are now using the results from the impact surveys and other contact with users to guide and prioritise the developments to the service. He also highlighted the huge amount of work that has gone on in the past year to the back-end architecture of the service that will make it much more reliable, maintainable and flexible going forward.
In the near future you can expect to see a new Download interface for Marine, after which will follow a similar upgrade to Historic Download including a better basket for all the downloaders, where you will be able to select data formats and dates more easily.
Have a look through the slides to see more of the upcoming improvements to the Digimap Service.
Mobile
The last part of the day was a welcome trip outside in the sunshine to see how Fieldtrip GB could be used for Citizen Science projects. The slides for this presentation can be found here:
Addy Pope led the group through an exercise where a form was designed to collect data about graffiti which was then deployed to the groups smart phones and tablets. Everybody then took their devices outside and began collecting data such as photos and the type of graffiti found. The devices take care of logging the location, though the app does allow you to modify this if it isn’t quite right.
Fieldtrip GB had some glowing praise from the delegates, everyone seemed to find the it intuitive and. easy to use. A very good way to crowd source data without an expensive outlay.
Final Summary
A very big thank you to all those who attended Geoforum, we at EDINA feel it was a tremendously successful event.
The days presentations an exhibitions told a story, starting with the importance of geospatial data, especially to bodies of such strategic importance as the Met Office. We heard how research carried out at academic institutions was adding to the accuracy of the data and the models that use the data, and how important access to the data was in order to carry out this research.
The exhibitors showed us the next generation of data along with some of the software to process it. And finally, the presenters from EDINA showed what we are doing to improve the accessibility to the data; not just by making it available but by providing the support and training to realise its full potential.
Jisc continue to provide funding for services such as Digimap, GoGeo and Unlock which form the backbone of geospatial services available to the academic community in Great Britain. The Geoforum allows funders and service providers to engage with the user community which in turn helps focus service improvements.
A final thank you to everyone who helped make the event happen, the EDINA staff who helped organise, present and pack away all the equipment; the exhibitors; Bluesky Catering; and the staff at the Informatics Forum.
Peter Gibbs is a well known for his BBC and Met Office weather forecasts and in his presentation he showed us the work that was being done by the Met Office and Environment Agency in combining their data and resources to predict not just where there is going to be rain but where the rain is likely to cause flooding.
ontinue to provide funding for services such as Digimap, GoGeo and Unlock which form the backbone of geospatial services available to the academic community in Great Britain. The Geoforum allows funders and service providers to engage with the user community which in turn helps focus service improvements.