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
Ordnance Survey will withdraw two products in 2016, the 1:10 000 Raster data and the Land-Form PROFILE data. To remind you that these products will no longer be available from the Digimap service we are putting them in a new category in Data Download. The Withdrawn category will contain these datasets until we have to remove them from the site, March 2016 for the 1:10 000 Scale Raster and September 2016 for the Land-Form PROFILE contours and DTM.
Remember that the VectorMap Local Raster data is a more detailed generally better product to use than the 1:10 000 scale raster. If you really need the cartography of the old version, you can create a print map from Digimap Roam which styles the VectorMap Local data to look like the 1:10 000 Scale Raster. Just zoom in to the Street or Neighbourhood view levels and then use the Basemaps button at the top left of the map to change to the VML Raster 10k styling. An added advantage to doing this is that you can add in contour lines which were never available with the old data.
The Land-Form Profile data has also been superseded, you should now use the OS Terrain 5 data instead. Although it is not available in DXF format, Terrain 5 is a much improved dataset compared to the older data and it is still available in the following formats: GML, Shapefile (for the contours) and ASCII (for the DTM).
If you have any questions about the withdrawal of these datasets then please let us know:
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:
Digimap’s new registration system was released on the 28th of January, we hope you’ll agree that it is a huge improvement over the previous version.
Users no longer have to wait up to 48 hours for registrations to be approved, they simply have to click a link in an email sent to them after filling in the registration form.
It already has its fans leading one site rep to say “I love the new registration system!” and another told us “Congratulations on instant registration for students. This is going to be very popular.”
The new instant access system is much more inline with user expectations from online services. Removing the need to wait overnight (or longer over weekends) to gain access has been very popular and has resulted in a significant increase in registrations during February. Over 6000 registrations were processed through the new system at all times of day and night!
We now need your help to make sure that the support material at your institution is up-to-date and that your students know that they can have access to the service the same day.
There is a full description of how to register using the new system in the help pages which guides you through the process:
If you are responsible for any local support pages, lecture notes, practical guides and any other course material please make sure these get updated. We actively encourage the incorporation of the images and text from the help page in any material produced. Please can you circulate this information as widely as possible to ensure that all users have up to date guidance.
One final plea is that you highlight the importance of entering the correct email address when registering. This should be an email address that is used regularly and it should be spelt correctly!
As blogged about last month, we have been working on a new Digimap registration system which will be released next Wednesday (28th January) The current registration system has been in place for over ten years. It has served us well, but it is now rather dated especially because users have to wait for their registration to be manually approved and processed overnight. The new registration system allows users to get instant access to Digimap. This will be a significant improvement and help those students that leave their Digimap coursework a bit late! At least now they will be able to get access quickly and easily (unfortunately we can’t guarantee they’ll get the work submitted on time though!) Detailed help pages will be available from Wednesday, once the release has been completed and Digimap is available to users. To help prepare site reps and support staff for the change, here is an overview of the registration process. Registering with Digimap Registration will now be an automated two-step process. Users will supply their details to register and then they must activate access to collections by agreeing to the individual licences. After logging into Digimap to start, users will be presented with the registration form to enter their name, email address, department, status and where they heard about Digimap. After hitting the submit button, users will be sent an email with a link to verify their account. Once they have successfully verified, they will be directed back to the Digimap homepage, where they then complete the next step of activating collection access. Agreeing to licence for Digimap collections (activating access)After verifying their email address, users will need to agree to the licences for each of the specific Digimap collections that they wish to use, this is done through the licence agreements page. Users will only be able to agree to licences for the collections that their institution subscribes to. Once the user has agreed to the licence(s) and hit the confirm button, they will have access to those Digimap collections. If the process is completed in one go, it takes no more than a few minutes. Much quicker than the current system! Existing users Existing users will not notice any change unless they have not been active in a collection for more than 12 months. Access to a collection expires after 12 months of inactivity. If that’s the case, they will be prompted to accept the licence when they try to access an application in that collection. Generally though, if someone has not accessed a particular collection for more than 12 months, we don’t expect they will activate access and therefore will not notice any change with the new system. Access to active collections will carry on as normal. If you have any questions or comments, please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk
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.
We are introducing a new registration system in January (26th to the 28th) and would like to give advance warning of the service disruption this is will cause.
New users will not be able to register for Digimap from 4pm on 26th January
All Digimap services will be unavailable all day on 27th January
Normal service will resume on 28th January
New registrations for Digimap, using the current system, will be closed from 4pm Monday 26th January to ensure that no registrations are lost during the changeover. All Digimap services will then be unavailable all day on Tuesday 27th January, while we put the new system in place. Once all the work is complete the service will be available again hopefully by midday on Wednesday 28th January.
We apologise for the inconvenience caused but due to the significant changes required to release the new system we must close access to Digimap during this time. We urge you to create any maps or download data that you may need during the period of service unavailability in advance.
The new registration system will allow users to register and instantly access Digimap Collections via email verification speeding up access for new users significantly. We hope that this will help make up for the fact that new users will be prevented from registering during the maintenance. Existing registered and active users will not notice any change once normal service has been resumed.
If you have any questions or concerns please contact us:
Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
Phone: 0131 650 3302
More details about how the new system looks and works will be posted on the Digimap blog in the New Year.
The new Ordnance Survey Licence includes some new and very interesting datasets for the Digimap service. We have already added OS Terrain 5, Ordnance Survey’s most detailed digital terrain model and contour data to the the Data Download facility. The other new datasets will require some additional effort to add into the service but we should have them available to download early in the new year. These new datasets are as follows:
OS MasterMap ITN Urban Paths
Routing information for walkers and cyclists in towns and cities.
Identifies areas as being in categories such as schools, hospitals, transport facilities etc. The data also highlights access points to the sites and routing destinations for more accurate travel distances.
Over 4 million points of interest classified into 3 tiers; 9 groups, 52 categories and 616 classes. The points of interest include accommodation, eating and drinking, commercial services, attractions, sport and entertainment, education and health, public infrastructure, manufacturing and production,retail, and transport.
Please note that Points of Interest data is made available under slightly different terms to the other Digimap Ordnance Survey datasets. Please see the EULA and FAQs for further details.
EDINA has had many requests for these datasets, especially the Urban Paths so we are very pleased to be able to offer them to you. We also intend adding some of these datasets to Digimap Roam so that they can be added to the maps you view and print as well.
Please contact the EDINA help desk if you want access to the datasets mentioned above before they are made available in the Data Download service:
Last week EDINA Geodata Services were exhibiting at the GeoDATA Showcase 2014 event in London. This was our second time to exhibit at this event which is aimed primarily at the commercial end of the GI industry covering current data and technology topics. This follows on from other events in the series as described previously on the GoGeo Blog.
We had a small stand, but the positive responses we got from visitors was very encouraging: from students who are currently using Digimap in their studies, to the lecturer in a university who said that Digimap was a great resource and essential to his teaching. Even more encouraging was the number of delegates and staff on other stands, with successful careers in the GI industry, who came up and said that they had used Digimap during their studies and it was a vital to their degree. It’s good to know that the future generations in the GI industry have the expectation that they will have easy access to high quality geospatial data, readily available from Digimap (at least while they are in education!).
We talked to delegates from a wide range of industries including environmental consultancies, government, data providers, local councils, defence and education as well as visiting and talking to many of the other exhibitors. We got a lot of useful feedback on what we’re doing and ideas for what we could be doing in the future including potential opportunities for collaboration. Of particular interest to delegates was the Fieldtrip GB app we were demonstrating which is a mobile data collection platform – especially once the magic word ‘free’ was mentioned, and also that there is an Open version available on Github.
Mince pies and mulled wine near the end were a welcome break from a long day, so busy that we didn’t actually get a chance to attend any of the talks, many of which looked very interesting, however it was a very useful event to attend. We look forward to next year’s event on the 3rd December 2015.
We have now added Ordnance Survey’s most detailed terrain data to the Data Download section of Digimap. OS Terrain 5 is created from the same source as the Ordnance Survey’s aerial imagery, meaning that it is kept up-to-date and works very well with the OS MasterMap® data.
OS Terrain 5 Contours, as the name suggests, have a 5 metre interval and the Digital Terrain Model (DTM) is on a 5 metre grid. The OS Website states the data has a good accuracy, typically exceeding 2 metres RMSE (not more than 2 metres different from the real world) with particular emphasis on significant landscape features such as roads, railways, slopes, quarries and lakes.
From Digimap’s Data Download the you can take up to 400 5 by 5 km tiles of OS Terrain 5 in a single download. The contour data is available in Shapefile or GML format and the DTM data is available as in ASC (Ascii Grid) format.
This new dataset has been included in Digimap due to the new licence agreement (see the previous blog post for more details). The other datasets included in the new licence, Urban Paths, MasterMap Site layer and Points of Interest data should be added into the service in the new year.
We are pleased to announce that a new Ordnance Survey licence agreement for Digimap is now available.
The new End User Licence Agreement (EULA) can be viewed in the Digimap Help Pages. As part of the new licence arrangements, end users need to agree to the EULA to access the Ordnance Survey data through the Digimap Service. Initially this will need to be done every time you access the collection via a popup after you select an application, however we are working on a new registration system that will mean you only need to do this once.
There is also an updated list of FAQs for the licence.
However, if you have any questions relating to the licence please do not hesitate to contact the Digimap support team.
Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
Phone: 0131 650 3302
What’s changed in the new agreement?
See below for key changes. Supplementary information is available from the EULA, the Ordnance Survey website and the EDINA helpdesk.
1. The following new products have been introduced to the Digimap Ordnance Survey collection under the new licence:
OS MasterMap® Integrated Transport Network Layer™ (ITN) Layer Urban Paths Theme.
OS MasterMap® Topography Layer will also contain the Sites Layer.
OS Terrain® 5, introduced as the new high resolution height dataset, replacing Land-Form PROFILE®.
PointX Points of Interest (PoI).
These will be made available through the Digimap service as soon as possible.
2. Changes to image publication size restrictions for external use
Image publication size restrictions have changed significantly with many being removed. Please refer to the Your Obligation/Restrictions section of the EULA, specifically Clause 5.1.4 and 5.2.
3. Public sector data sharing rights
In certain situations, it is now possible for you to share Digimap Ordnance Survey data with government departments and for government departments to share their Ordnance Survey data with you. For further details please see FAQs 27 & 28 in Licence FAQ section and consult the EULA Clause 4.
4. Authorised Data Handler
Where a Digimap Authorised User needs to use Ordnance Survey data in a secure data service, the new Digimap Licence now permits that via a separate Digimap Data Handler Agreement. Please see EULA Clause 3.1.4.
5. Educational navigation product/service
For Educational Use, you are now permitted to build Educational navigation apps. See the EULA, Clause 3.4 for the scope of what is permitted.
6. Use of YouTube and Twitter
You may now publish Ordnance Survey data, in line with strict terms detailed in EULA Clause 5, on YouTube and Twitter.
7. There is a change in the copyright notice that must be included on any maps
You must include the following acknowledgements on any display or reproduction of the Ordnance Survey Licensed data:
Where the date to be inserted should be the current year.
For HE institutions:
If you are responsible for your HE institution subscribing to Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection you should already have received an email from Jisc Collections detailing how your institution can agree to the new Sub-Licence. Full details can be found on the Jisc Collections website.
If you have any further questions then please contact the Digimap Support team:
Ordnance Survey will withdraw two products in 2016, the 1:10 000 Raster data and the Land-Form PROFILE data. To remind you that these products will no longer be available from the Digimap service we are putting them in a new category in Data Download. The Withdrawn category will contain these datasets until we have to remove them from the site, March 2016 for the 1:10 000 Scale Raster and September 2016 for the Land-Form PROFILE contours and DTM.
Remember that the VectorMap Local Raster data is a more detailed generally better product to use than the 1:10 000 scale raster. If you really need the cartography of the old version, you can create a print map from Digimap Roam which styles the VectorMap Local data to look like the 1:10 000 Scale Raster. Just zoom in to the Street or Neighbourhood view levels and then use the Basemaps button at the top left of the map to change to the VML Raster 10k styling. An added advantage to doing this is that you can add in contour lines which were never available with the old data.
The Land-Form Profile data has also been superseded, you should now use the OS Terrain 5 data instead. Although it is not available in DXF format, Terrain 5 is a much improved dataset compared to the older data and it is still available in the following formats: GML, Shapefile (for the contours) and ASCII (for the DTM).
