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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
EDINA is pleased to announce the launch of Aerial Digimap, a new Collection offering aerial photography from Getmapping Plc.
Aerial imagery capture dates
The crystal clear imagery from Getmapping is 25cm resolution vertical aerial photography and the most detailed national coverage available. The largest proportion of the imagery dates from post-2011 with updates due every year.
Aerial Digimap offers both a mapping and a data download facility, both familiar to those who already have access to other Digimap Collections.
Aerial Roam offers the ability to view, annotate and print the aerial photographs as well as an overlay function to allow comparison with current Ordnance Survey mapping.
Aerial Roam with Road/Place name overlay
Aerial Download offers the ability to select specific locations for which to download the aerial photography for use in local desktop software. Data is delivered in jpeg format each with a corresponding world file (.jgw).
In order to access Aerial Digimap, your institution must subscribe. Please contact your local Digimap Site representative, Learning Resources team or Information Services to express your interest, (you can find your site rep details on this help page: http://bit.ly/DigimapSiteReps).
Subscriptions must be requested by an authorised member of staff. Details about how to subscribe to Aerial Digimap can be found here: http://bit.ly/AerialDigimapSubs
Please contact EDINA directly on edina@ed.ac.uk with any subscription enquiries.
Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh by kim traynor [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsEDINA’s annual Geoforum conference for all its geospatial services and projects was held at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Geography this year. It was attended by nearly 50 delegates who came to find out what we have been up to over the past year and to see what we new things they can expect in the coming months.
The morning session started with talks from Tim Urwin, EDINA’s geo-data manager, and Guy McGarva, from the Geosupport team. Tim’s talk informed us all about the design decisions made when updating the OS MasterMap cartographic style. The new styling, originally developed for the Digimap for Schools service, has some great advantages over the old cartography and was put into service just after the conference:
Guy’s talk highlighted the main changes to EDINA’s geospatial offering in the last 12 months. We have mainly been working on things that you can’t “see” in Digimap with huge improvements to the way the service is delivered. We now can make sure that interruptions to the service are rare as it can be delivered from one of two physical locations at the University of Edinburgh.
One obvious change we delivered was the improved Digimap home page. This came about through work to make the service usable on a touch screen or tablet device. To ensure that the service could work on these devices we needed to use new web technologies meaning a redesign had to be carried out. We like the cleaner design but best of all you can now just click on the application you want to use, log in when prompted, and be taken straight to the thing you want to do. No more remembering to log in to the service before clicking the link in your Data Download email!
The next two talks were all about Aerial Imagery as EDINA will soon be launching the Aerial Digimap service. The new service will contain 25cm resolution aerial photographs for the whole of Great Britain from Getmapping.
Firstly we head from Richard Evans from Getmapping who spoke about the history of aerial imagery and also the modern technology and techniques that go in to it’s creation.
Then we heard from Ian Holmes from EDINA, who showed us what the new Digimap Aerial collection would look like. As with the other Digimap collections there will be Roam and Download interfaces to either view the data or to take it away to analyse in the user’s own software.
Ian also highlighted some of the interesting and quirky things captured in the images, such as the shadows of giraffes at Chester Zoo.
Please keep watching the blog and other Digimap information channels for an announcement on when the service will be launching.
After a good lunch spent networking we started on the afternoon session where we heard from two students and two members of teaching staff about their uses of Digimap and data from the services.
Firstly we heard from Trevor Draeseke who told us about his Masters Thesis, Visualising Geographical Information in Augmented Reality.
Trevor’s proof of concept mobile app the “Arthur’s Seat Augment Reality Visualiser” allowed the user to view geological data and other layered geographic information on the live video feed coming from the phones camera. He said his work was made possible by the “easy and flexible access to the underlying geographical information layers through EDINA’s Digimap Service.”
Next we heard from Kathy O’Donnell who is now in the first year of a PhD that is building on her MSc thesis on the Quarries of Hadrian’s Wall.
Kathy has been mixing layers from the various data collections in Digimap: Ordnance Survey, Historic and Geology, to identify where the Romans were quarrying the stone to build Hadrian’s Wall. Kathy’s work is one of the best examples of making use of the various collections we have seen and she is looking forward to hopefully being able to use Aerial Digimap as another important source of data.
After a short break we heard the perspective of teaching staff from the University of Stirling and Lancaster University. Firstly Phil Bartie, University of Stirling, talked about how Digimap Roam was useful for introducing students to digital mapping and and also that it was “very important that students and academics have access to high quality spatial data for teaching and research.”
The final talk of the day came from Duncan Whyatt and Gemma Davies from Lancaster University. Duncan first reminisced on life before Digimap, and how difficult it was to get hold of maps and spatial data. After subscribing they have concentrated more heavily on the data downloaded from Digimap in the Geography Department. Duncan and Gemma took us through the various exercises the students were given using data downloaded from Digimap at each stage of their degree. Duncan stated that “Digimap has underpinned Undergraduate teaching in GIS at Lancaster for 15 years…”
Despite showing how important Digimap is and has been in studying and teaching all four of the presentations contained mentions of what they’d like to see in the future and a final challenge from Duncan to stay relevant in a world with an increasing amount of alternatives. We have heard this challenge and are working with those who fund the service to make sure our offering stays up-to-date and continues to deliver what academia wants. However we would like to remind all users of Digimap to keep letting us know what you want from the service so we have enough evidence to shape future developments in the right way.
A final thank you to all those who gave a presentation, the Institute of Geography for providing a venue, and to all the attendees; we felt it was a very successful event and look forward to the next one in 2017.
If you have any questions, comments or feedback on this post then let us know:
This summer our cartographic team have been busy working on a new style for OS MasterMap Topography layer. These are the maps displayed at the three most detailed zoom levels in Digimap OS Roam. The original style, created more than ten years ago, followed the official style published by Ordnance Survey and has undergone little change since its creation. Later this year Ordnance Survey are making significant changes to the underlying MasterMap data so we thought it was high time the cartography was refreshed to give it a more modern feel.
The design brief had three broad requirements:
make it look ‘nicer’!
tone down the colours to allow annotations to stand out more
use the same colours as OS VectorMap Local, the second most detailed data product
The images below show the original and new styling for a number of areas which highlight the improvements that have been made in both urban and rural areas.
Changes to styling in urban areas:
The colours in urban areas have been muted, removing the large areas of yellow and making ‘unclassified’ land appear with hatching rather than as blank areas on the map.
Improvements in text styling:
Text labels have been updated to emphasise building names and reduce the size of the labels for named urban areas.
Updated rural styling:
Styling in rural areas with mixed land use is a challenge as there are multiple types which need to be conveyed to the user. We have increased the number of shades of green and improved the symbol spacing and placement in order to improve the appearance of these areas. Additionally we have changed the fill colour for tracks allowing them to be more easily distinguished from paved roads.
Updated foreshore styling:
Foreshore areas now display using the yellow ‘sand’ colour, making them far easier to visualise.
We hope you like the new style, however the original style can still be accessed from the Basemap menu in OS Roam:
If you have any questions about the updates or Digimap please contact us:
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 we will be introducing some changes to the geospatial data services offered by EDINA to the academic community. These include new Ordnance Survey data products and updated licence agreements for most of the Digimap Collections. We also hope to present some case studies from staff and students who have been using data from Digimap and the other geospatial services from EDINA.
The conference will be located in the University of Edinburgh’s geography department on Drummond Street. We will also be highlighting what we have done over the summer to improve Digimap.
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 2016
Please contact us if you have any questions:
Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
Find out what happened at last year’s event: GeoForum 2015
We are now at the start of a new academic year and Digimap has new licence agreements in place for the Ordnance Survey, Geology and Historic Map and Data Collections. You may have noticed already that you have been asked to agree to the licence again when you logged in. This is because some of the terms are different and you are required to agree to these new terms prior to accessing the data within the service.
When you login you will notice the Licence Agreements button at the top right of the home page.
Clicking on this will allow to you to view the licences you have agreed to and to agree to those you have not yet agreed to.
If a Collection has a new licence, the applications (e.g. Roam and Data Download) in that Collection will also appear grey. By trying to access an application which has a new licence, you will automatically be taken through the process of agreeing to it if you have not yet done so.
All you need to do is accept the licence and restate your purpose for using the service (which may or may not have changed since you agreed to the previous licence) and you will have access to the service once more.
If you have any questions or need any help or guidance have a look at the Agreeing to Licences for Digimap Collections section half way down the following help page:
The new look home page we told you about in the last blog post, has now been launched.
Along with the fresh new look for the start of the new academic year we have also updated the registration and licence agreement pages. The structure of the pages and access to the applications has not been changed, so you should have no problem navigating around the page.
Please let us know if you have any questions or need any more information:
We have been hard at work developing a fresh new look for Digimap which we will be launching for the new academic year. Here is a sneak preview, though please note that nothing has been finalised just yet:
The operation of the page remains the same and the layout is almost identical, we have just given it a modern fresh look. We hope you like it!
If you have any questions or require any more information then please feel free to contact us:
A number of datasets have been updated in June 2016, all in the Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection. As well as updates to the 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 Colour Raster products (which are the digital versions of the ever popular Explorer and Landranger paper map series), this month we have also updated the relatively new OS Open Rivers dataset, an image of the full network is shown on the right hand side. This is the first update to the dataset which was first released in March 2015. Users should note that this dataset is still a Beta version, so changes to the specification and/or delivery method are still possible.
OS Data Download:
Product Name
OS Publication Date
OS MasterMap ITN Layer Urban Paths Theme
April 2016
Code-Point
May 2016
1:250,000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2016
1:25,000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2016
1:50,000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2016
OS Open Rivers
June 2016
*1:50,000 Scale Gazetteer
May 2016
* Note: this is the last update to 1:50,000 Scale Gazetteer as Ordnance Survey have announced that they are retiring this product. Users are advised to use OS Open Names instead. Whilst the data will still be available to download through Digimap, this product will no longer be updated to reflect changes in the real world.
![kim traynor [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/digimap/wp-content/uploads/sites/6760/2016/08/University_building_Drummond_Street_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_1352882-1.jpg)
