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
//EDINA is very excited to be holding a joint event with King’s College, London on Thursday 22nd March 2018, exploring the benefits of Digimap . Watch this space for a write-up of the event. If you’re joining us, we’re looking forward to seeing you!
//EDINA will be exhibiting at the Jisc Digifest 2018 conference on 6th and 7th March at the ICC in Birmingham. Come and talk to us about exciting developments with Digimap! We will have demonstrations of all the Digimap services and staff on hand to answer any questions. We will be at Pod 19 in the Exhibitor Zone and DigiLab area.
Directions on how to get to the ICC are here: International Convention Centre Broad Street, Birmingham, B1 2EA.
//Digimap have scheduled two “open surgery” webinars, open to all Digimap users. These hour long sessions offer the opportunity for you to ask any questions you may have about Digimap.
Our team have a wealth of experience of mapping data and can help you with:
We’d welcome questions about any aspect of the service, or if you’d just like to give us some feedback that would be very welcome. Hope to see you there.
Book now!
NOTE: Previous webinar recordings, along with slides and Q&A transcripts can be viewed on the webinar materials page.
//Those with long memories will remember the launch of Digimap on 10th January 2000. This means that the service has just turned 18!
Much has changed since then, with a move from a single mapping application to “lite” and advanced versions through to the recently updated Roam mapping application available today. Changes in web mapping technology have moved on apace, licensing has developed considerably, the range of data available within Digimap has expanded and the number of users and range of uses has increased exponentially. Digimap has enjoyed many ringing endorsements over the years and EDINA will continue to ensure that Digimap offers value and benefit to the academic sector. Happy Birthday Digimap!
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We recently made available, through the Digimap Lidar Collection, a wealth of Vertical Aerial Imagery data captured by the Environment Agency for England. The Environment Agency has been capturing vertical aerial imagery since 2006 on a project by project basis, so the coverage is not continuous across England. Availability grids for each year of data are available in the Lidar Download application. Data is available in some locations for multiple dates where the location has been surveyed on more than one occasion.
Some of the imagery was captured at night time giving an insight in to the effects of urban light pollution.
The data is supplied in the raster ECW (enhance compressed wavelet) format, which should be readable by most modern GIS and image processing software. The data is tiled and tile sizes range from 1km x 1km to 5km x 5km and the resolution of the data ranges from 10cm to 50cm. There are three types of imagery available:
Lidar download is available to all institutions that subscribe to Aerial Digimap, meaning that subscribing institutions now have access to another detailed aerial imagery dataset.
For information on subscribing to Aerial Digimap, please see the subscription page.
If you have any questions about the new data or Digimap please contact us:
//On a recent visit to the University of Exeter the Digimap team learned of their regular Mapathon sessions. Dr Damien Mansell from the University of Exeter’s Department of Geography has kindly written a short piece about their mapathons for this blog:
The second week of November was an important one for Geographers and Geography departments around the world. Not only was it Open Street Map Geography Awareness Week but on the 15th of November it was also GIS day. Both initiatives are international forums to develop interest and understanding of the subject, the technology of Geographical Information Systems, showcase applications, raise public awareness of the significance of place and encourage collaborative mapping. To celebrate, the University of Exeter Geography department hosted a Missing Maps Mapathon. The mapathon collaborates with British Red Cross and Humanitarian Open Street Map Team to map an area where humanitarian organisations are trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people. This mapathon was mapping the Kurigram District in Bangladesh in order to effectively implement disaster risk reduction activities, to enhance resilience to future floods. During the 2 hour mapathon which included wine and pizza, The University of Exeter volunteers managed to make 2,272 map edits which included 2,035 buildings and 1,134 km of roads. The humanitarian aid projects continues at Exeter and we encourage you to host a mapathon for yourselves! http://www.missingmaps.org/host/
Images copyright Dr Damien Mansell/University of Exeter
//On 30th November 2017, we released Beta versions of our new Roam mapping application for all Digimap Collections. Log in to Digimap and click on each Collection to find the link to each new Roam:
The functionality of the new application remains the same, but we hope you agree that the updated look is easier to use.
Most importantly, BOTH versions of Roam (new and old) will run in parallel for an extended period of time to give users the opportunity to get used to the new interface. We will review this at the beginning of March 2018 with a view to establishing a date for withdrawal of the old application.
Known Issues
All applications have undergone thorough testing, but there are still a few issues that we working on, for example some elements can be slow using Internet Explorer. If you spot anything that is not behaving correctly, please report this to us.
We encourage you to try the new beta versions and we welcome any feedback you have.
//On 3rd October 2017, we released a Beta version of a new Roam mapping client for Digimap’s Ordnance Survey Collection. OS Roam – Beta is available next to the existing version, simply log in to the Digimap service and select Ordnance Survey Collection to view the new beta version:
Whilst the functionality remains the same, we hope you agree that the look and feel of the interface is more modern. The majority of functions are available from a new menu panel down the left hand side, which is hidden by default, maximising the area available for the main map element.
There are some issues we are aware of in this version, which we are working on, for example, some elements can be slow using Internet Explorer and Edge.
New versions of the Roam applications in all other collections will be available in due course. Both new and old versions will run side by side for an extended period of time to give users the opportunity to get used to the new interface.
We would encourage you to try the beta version and we welcome any feedback you have.
//We are pleased to announce a new webinar series for Digimap over the coming months. These short sessions are free to attend and are available to any Digimap user, whether staff, student or researcher. You will need to register to attend each webinar. Bookings will open a couple of weeks before each webinar is scheduled. The majority of the webinars will be recorded and made available via our Digimap YouTube channel for those who were unable to attend.
All webinars will run from 13:00-13:30.
Previous webinar recordings, along with slides and Q&A transcripts can be viewed on the webinar materials page.
//We recently helped out the very talented Alasdair Rae from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield with some research on the buildings of Great Britain. Here is his blog post which is a great work of GIS sleuthery: Buildings of Great Britain
As mentioned in his post we assisted Alasdair by backing up the figures he created using Ordnance Survey’s OpenMap – Local dataset with information from the more authoritative OS MasterMap data.
So what did we find out? First of all, we had to measure how big OS MasterMap says Great Britain is and instantly we hit an issue, tides. It was quite tricky trying to unpick what is and isn’t covered when the tide comes in from the OS MasterMap classifications. After a bit of data wrangling we came up with the fascinating factoid that Britain shrinks and grows by 3454 Km2 twice a day!
With this settled, we could then move on to figuring out how much of each of the home nations was covered by buildings (at high tide!). We found 42.5 million objects in OS MasterMap classified as buildings, which we then had to measure and divide up into England, Scotland and Wales. Note that we were just working out the area covered by buildings, not paved areas or roads etc. EDINA has the OS MasterMap data held in a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS installed for spatial analysis like this. Despite the database’s very large size the queries came back relatively quickly from our server, and showed that Alasdair’s figures were very close. The figures based on OS MasterMap were slightly higher and we think that although generalisation tends to enlarge the building polygons, the inclusion of thousands of smaller buildings omitted from OpenMap – Local accounted for a larger amount.
England – 2635.87 Km2
Scotland – 316.15 Km2
Wales – 195.67 Km2
To give some sense of what these values look like we put them into another infographic for you:
Thanks again to Alasdair Rae for letting us collaborate on his research and for raising such interesting questions we can ask of the data. Thanks also to Ordnance Survey for creating all this data in the first place so we can find these things out!
One last interesting fact that came out of the research was that Great Britain has 22.75 Km2 of glass houses, that’s the same as 3155 football pitches!
