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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
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:
Even though we update our mapping data throughout the year we still make a large number of changes over the summer.
Along with the general updates to MasterMap and a few other products the biggest change over the summer has been to swap the 1:10 000 Scale Raster maps to VectorMap Local Raster maps in Digimap Roam. Ordnance Survey have retired the 1:10 000 data, so we have removed it from the online maps, though you do still have a couple of options if you are a fan of the product:
You can view the VectorMap Local data styled to look like the 1:10 000 maps at two zoom levels in Roam; remember that on the Map Content tab you can remove the contours for a very close representation of the mapping.
We still make the 1:10 000 data available in Digimap’s Data Download interface, and will continue to do so for at least this academic year.
The table below details all of the latest changes we have made showing the currency dates of all Ordnance Survey datasets in Digimap.
Digimap Roam
Ordnance Survey product
Data Currency
Last updated in Roam
OS MasterMap® Topography Layer
May 2014
July 2014
OS VectorMap® Local
July 2014
September 2014
OS VectorMap® Local Raster
July 2014
September 2014
1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster
March 2014
March 2014
1:50 000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2014
July 2014
Meridian™ 2
January 2014
March 2014
OS Terrain™ 50
July 2013
October 2013
OS VectorMap® District Raster
September 2014
September 2014
Strategi®
January 2014
March 2014
1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2014
September 2014
MiniScale®
January 2014
February 2014
Data Download
Ordnance Survey product
Data Currency
Last updated in Data Download
OS MasterMap® Integrated
Transport Network™ (ITN) Layer
May 2014
September 2014
OS MasterMap® Topography Layer
May 2013
September 2014
OS MasterMap® Topography Layer Raster
June 2013
October 2013
Backdrop Mapping
* 1:10 000 Scale Raster
June 2013
October 2013
OS Street View®
April 2014
April 2014
1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster
March 2014
March 2014
OS VectorMap® Local Raster
July 2014
September 2014
OS VectorMap® District Raster
September 2014
September 2014
1:50 000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2014
July 2014
1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster
June 2014
June 2014
MiniScale®
January 2014
January 2014
Land and Height Data
* Land-Form PROFILE®
November 2009
September 2011
* Land-Form PROFILE® DTM
November 2009
September 2011
OS Terrain™ 50
July 2014
September 2014
OS Terrain™ 50 DTM
July 2014
September 2014
* Land-Form PANORAMA®
November 1993
September 2011
* Land-Form PANORAMA ® DTM
June 2006
September 2011
Vector Data
OS VectorMap® Local
July 2014
September 2014
OS VectorMap® District
September 2014
September 2014
Meridian™ 2
January 2014
February 2014
Strategi®
January 2014
February 2014
Boundary and Location Data
Boundary-Line™
May 2014
May 2014
Code-Point®
August 2014
September 2014
Code-Point® Open
August 2014
September 2014
Code-Point® with polygons
April 2014
July 2014
OS Locator™
May 2014
May 2014
1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer
June 2014
June 2014
* Land-Form PANORAMA®, PROFILE® and 1:10 000 Scale Raster products have been withdrawn by Ordnance Survey and are no longer updated.
Other Updates
Remember there have also been substantial changes made to the Geology and Marine data holdings in recent months:
It is now easier to see which formats are available for the data product you are downloading and change it if you need to, this blog post shows you how:
As part of our work to demonstrate the impact of Digimap, EDINA has calculated the commercial value of all the data downloaded and maps created for printing. We calculated the values per institution for the period August 2012 to May 2013 then totalled them; this came to approximately £39 .5 million. This estimate is a conservative one as 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) the value rises to nearly £71 million.
Click to enlarge image.
We know that some data is downloaded multiple times within an institution, for example by the students in a class exercise or for specific study sites. We found that only 40% of the data taken from Digimap over a period of time was unique to an average institution. We believe that if institutions were paying commercial rates for their data it would be more likely that they would try to download it once and then circulate it to those who need it; for this reason the value calculations only include 40% of the total. 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 have included the 100% figure as a ceiling value.
In total, over the past three academic years over £190 million (£100 million at 40%) worth of print maps and data has been served up from Digimap to subscribing institutions.
How the Costs are Calculated
Click to enlarge image.
The costs used in our calculations for the data downloaded come from the data suppliers, and include any relevant multipliers or discounts made publicly available on their websites.
The data values are calculated on a per product / per institution basis, with the data preparation and licensing charges assigned only once per product, per institution. Many of the data collections are 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 based on the number of active registered users for each collection at an institution. SeaZone data is provided commercially through a third party website; we picked the closest match possible to the data we provide though this does have a lower cost, again making the estimates conservative.
We capped data values at the price it would cost to take national coverage of each product, making it impossible to charge more for any one product than it would to supply the entire dataset for use by the whole institution.
The values for the print maps (including saved images in Carto and Ancient Roam) are calculated by finding the cheapest available commercial map prints from websites such as eMapsite, NLS and FiND. These values are updated every time we calculate the values.
What We Didn’t Include
Click to enlarge image.
No monetary values were assigned to the millions of screen maps that are produced from Digimap; we couldn’t find a comparable site! Also, the value calculated doesn’t take into account any of the support materials, training courses and help desk 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 over 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 companies policy. 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 put in requests for data or to create and manage a repository for spatial data.
Digimap does all this work for its subscribers along with providing a high quality mapping interface, 24 hour access to expensive high quality data and maps.
Over the coming weeks we will be sending out each institution’s values to Digimap site representatives. If you are interested in the value of the maps and data your institution has been using then get in touch with them. If you are unsure who your site representative is then please contact us:
Ordnance Survey would like the academic community to know that the next GeoVation event on “Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport” will take place at the Royal Society of Arts, in London on 24 September 2012.
With rapid developments in social media technology, smartphone apps, open data, and volunteered geographic information, in a context of doing more with less and doing that sustainably, ‘Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport’ considers:
* The barriers to collaboration and user innovation in transport and how they can be overcome.
* How can real users’ needs be identified and addressed?
* How can open data be used effectively?
* How can business, government, communities and academia collaborate to create real value in improving transport?
* Collaborative consumption, creation and resourcing.
* Creating shared value and business model innovation in transport.
These and other topics will be explored by leaders and pioneers in their field through: keynote speeches, quick fire Pecha Kucha-like presentations, exhibition, and lively, interactive discussion with you, the participating audience, followed by an evening networking programme.
If you use Mozilla’s Firefox as your browser then you may not be able to access Digimap’s Carto application. The reason for this is that Mozilla is now (from the 30th August 2012) automatically blocking Java. The reason that Mozilla has taken this stance is that a Java exploit has been added to the notorious Blackhole exploit toolkit. In simple terms, running Java applications through your browser opens your machine up to hackers, and we dont want that.
We are working on Carto’s successor which we hope to launch in 2013 and this will not rely on Java. If you need to use Carto, then it will still work in Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers. Hopefully Java will patch the breach soon and it will work again in Firefox.
For more information about this security issue please read this.
On the 13th of September we held the annual update of the maps and map data in Digimap. There haven’t been any major specification changes this time though you will notice some cartographic changes to the MiniScale maps in Digimap Roam.
The Urban areas are now purple and on the more zoomed out maps there has been some enhancement to the relief shading.
All the following data products were updated to the latest version available:
MasterMap Topography and ITN Layers:
Meridian2
Strategi
MiniScale
Code-Point
Code-Point with Polygons
Boundary Line
1:250,000 Colour Raster
1:50 000 Colour Raster
1:25 000 Colour Raster
1:10 000 Raster
1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer
All the products have been updated in Digimap Roam, Carto and all the different Data Downloaders. The following products were not updated as the versions were already the most up-to-date available:
As lots of people are currently working on projects and dissertations we thought we’d share a few tips on using the OS MasterMap data from Digimap.
NOTE: MasterMap Download will be temporarily unavailable as part of the ‘At Risk’ period on Monday the 22nd of August. It will also be unavailable for about an hour on either Wednesday 24th or Thursday the 25th of August as well. This is to allow for some essential hardware maintenance on the server that houses the Database. We are really sorry for any inconvenience this causes.
The MasterMap data available will be updated as part of our annual data refresh at the beginning of September. If you need the 2010-2011s data then please order in advance of Monday the 22nd to ensure you don’t get caught up with the maintenance.
Downloading the Data
Remember that if you just want MasterMap as a background map you can use the 1:1000 or 1:2000 Raster versions of the data. This is available from the Data Download facility:
Once you have downloaded your MasterMap Data you will most likely need to convert it into a format that your GIS can use. There are three main options to do this, InterpOSe, OSM2MIF and Productivity Suite, see the following link for more information:
This year’s annual data update will take place at the beginning of September. There will be a refresh the following Ordnance Survey products:
MasterMap Topography and ITN Layers
VectorMap Local
Meridian2
Strategi
MiniScale
Code-Point
Code-Point with Polygons
Boundary Line
1:250,000 Colour Raster
1:50 000 Colour Raster
1:25 000 Colour Raster
1:10 000 Raster
1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer
There will also be updated Hydrospatial data in Marine Digimap and a new version of the DiGMapGB-50 data in Geology Digimap.
Along with the new data Ancient Roam will be getting the Annotation Tools and there may be a bit of a surprise bonus addition to Digimap Roam. More information will be posted on the Blog, Twitter and Facebook page nearer the time.
The VectorMap Local (VML) maps mentioned in the previous blog posts are now working in Digimap Roam. There is a video on YouTube showing you how to view all the different mapping styles that are now available at the four most zoomed in levels; including all the VML maps and Land-Line style MasterMap:
