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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
As well as releasing the new OS MasterMap Water Network Layer earlier this month, we have also updated a number of datasets available in the Ordnance Survey collection. Most notably this month we have updated OS Open Map – Local, the most detailed OpenData product available from Ordnance Survey. OS Open Map – Local was initially released as a beta product in March 2015. The October 2016 release of Open Map – Local marks the end of the beta period and provides the first main version of the dataset.
The first main release of Open Map – Local has a few changes over the prevous beta version, including:
enhancements to the features included in the Important Buildings feature class
creation of a raster version optimised for display at 1:10,000 scale, this will be the replacement for OS Street View which is no longer updated and will be withdrawn by OS in March 2017
OS Open Map – Local (Raster) Birmingham city centre
OS Open Map – Local (Vector) Birmingham city centre
The tables below list all the datasets that were updated this month.
OS Data Download:
Product Name
OS Publication Date
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer
October 2016
OS MasterMap Sites Layer
October 2016
OS VectorMap Local
October 2016
OS VectorMap Local Raster
October 2016
OS Terrain 5 DTM
October 2016
OS Terrain 5 Contours
October 2016
OS Open Map – Local (Raster)
October 2016
OS Open Map – Local (Vector)
October 2016
Code-Point
November 2016
Code-Point Open
November 2016
OS Roam:
Product Name
OS Publication Date
OS VectorMap Local
October 2016
OS VectorMap Local Raster
October 2016
The OS data update page is kept up to date with all dataset updates in the collections.
If you have any questions about the dataset updates or Digimap please contact us:
We are pleased to announce the addition of two new datasets to the Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection, which are available to download through the Data Download application. Both these datasets are detailed network datasets and form part of the OS MasterMap family of products. The datasets should prove useful for individuals carrying out detailed network analysis using the road and river network of Great Britain.
OS MasterMap Highways Network
OS MasterMap Highways Network is a new dataset from Ordnance Survey which provides the most detailed road network dataset available for Great Britain. The new Highways Network product is a replacement for OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network (ITN), which will be retired at some point in the future. Highways Network was built using ITN as the base network and then further improved adding information from other authoritative sources including the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) and local authorities in England and Wales.
OS MasterMap Highways Network with OS MasterMap Topography Layer (raster version)
Highways Network is provided in GML format as a single, national dataset covering the whole of Great Britain. This is a large dataset and is available through Digimap as a single download of 1.1GB in size.
Ordnance Survey have produced a number of supporting documents that are available for download directly from their website. We recommend that you consult these before using the data.
Current version: June 2016
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer is a new network dataset from Ordnance Survey that represenets the centrelines of watercourses including flow direction and suplementary information.
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer on top of aerial imagery for an area of the Scottish Highlands
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer is provided in GML format in 5 x 5km tiles. Water network features that cross tile boundaries are included in all tiles that they cross, so the data is called ‘hairy data’ due to the presence of these ‘hairs’ around the edge of each tile. This means that some processing is required to de-duplicate the features that cross tile boundaries if your order contains data from more than one 5 x 5km tile.
OS MasterMap Water Network Layer is projected in the ESPG 7405, which is a British National Grid projection that also includes the Z value using Ordnance Datum Newlyn.
Ordnance Survey have produced a Getting Started Guide which describes the process of importing the Water Network Layer in to common GIS packages.
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:
As many of you may be aware, the number of users of the Digimap service using CAD systems has increased considerably over the years. As this user base has grown we have endeavoured to make the data we provide as easy to use as possible in these systems. As part of this effort to continually improve the service we offer, we have made some considerable enhancements to the products we offer for use in CAD systems.
Part of the problem is that there is a proliferation of systems in use under the general banner of ‘CAD’ systems, including AutoCAD, Revit, Rhinoceros, Vectorworks to name a few. A common factor between these systems is that they can accept vector data in DWG format, however, the way that DWG data is handled can vary between systems.
A number of our products in DWG format were loading into CAD systems but some were not correctly spatially referenced. This meant that although the data looked fine and worked perfectly well on its own, but it was difficult to overlay or integrate it with other datasets. We have now fixed this issue, so that it is possible to overlay common products together much more easily.
To accompany the DWG map data we also provide Digital Terrain Model (DTM) data to allow you to create a landsurface to loacte buildings and infrastructure on. In the past we only provided the OS Terrain 5 DTM in a format that was not so easily used in some CAD systems. To remedy this, we are now delivering OS Terrain 5 DTM in the XYZ format that can be used in most CAD systems.
These are the Changes we have made:
All data available as DWG should overlay correctly where appropriate in AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD, AutoCAD Civil, Revit and Rhinoceros.
All data has the correct Spatial Reference (British National Grid) and Units (metres).
OS Terrain 5 Contours are available as 3D Polyline data which is suitable for creating surfaces in Revit and Rhinoceros 5.
OS Terrain 5 DTM is available in an XYZ format which can be used to create surfaces in AutoCAD and Rhinoceros 5.
OS MasterMap Sites Layer is now available in DWG.
OS MasterMap Topography Layer Building Height Attribute data on top of OS Terrain 5 Contours
We have updated our help pages in line with these changes and recommend that you consult the AutoCAD FAQ page which has further details for how you can load Digimap data in to common CAD packages.
We hope our CAD users find these changes useful but if you have any questions about using Digimap data in a CAD system please let us know. Similarly if you can provide us with any information about using Digimap data in a CAD system we would be very pleased to hear from you.
A number of datasets in the Ordnance Survey Collection have been updated in May this year. We’ve also made a number of improvements to some of the datasets that are popular for 3D modelling which will hopefully make it easier to use these datasets in CAD applications. The main changes are:
OS MasterMap Sites Layer now available in DWG and ESRI Shapefile format (previously it was only available in GML)
OS Terrain 5 DTM is now available in XYZ format for use in CAD applications
OS Terrain 5 Contours in DWG format are now provided as as 3D contours with the height of each feature set to the correct contour height
The data format help page has been updated to reflect these changes and is a good place to go if you are interested to see which datasets are available in a specific format.
The dataset updates are detailed in the tables below for OS Data Download and OS Roam:
OS Data Download:
Product Name
OS Publication Date
Boundary Line
May 2016
* OS Locator
May 2016
OS Terrain 5 Contours
April 2016
OS Terrain 5 DTM
April 2016
OS VectorMap Local Raster
April 2016
OS VectorMap Local
April 2016
OS Open Roads
May 2016
Code-Point Open
May 2016
* Note: this is the last update to OS Locator that will be supplied by Ordnance Survey who 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, these products will no longer be updated to reflect changes in the real world.
In April 2015 we made OS MasterMap Topography Layer data available to CAD users in DWG format. If you missed the announcement you can read all about it in this blog post. Since adding this option to Digimap we have processed over 13,000 orders for MasterMap in DWG format. Building on this we have now produced an outline ‘Plan’ style of MasterMap in DWG format which is a stripped down representation that mimics the alternative ‘Line Drawing’ style of MasterMap available in the Digimap Roam application.
OS MasterMap Topography Layer in standard and plan style
The alternative ‘Plan’ style is a cut down version of the full dataset and does not include polygons, users requiring the full dataset should download the original ‘Standard’ style which includes both lines and polygons.
The style is specified in the basket window of the Data Download application using the drop-down in the ‘Theme’ column:
Selecting DWG plan style in the basket
We hope you find this new style useful, if you have any questions or suggestions for further improvements please contact us:
A new MasterMap data layer is available to download that allows you to add an extra level of information to your maps. The Sites Layer shows boundaries for features such as schools, hospitals and other government property. The dataset currently contains the extents of over 40,000 important locations in Great Britain broken down in to seven themes, with more to be added in the future:
MasterMap Sites Layer includes access points, such as pedestrian gates and driveways, and routing points allowing the data to be fully integrated with other OS products including MasterMap Topography Layer and MasterMap Integrated Transport Network (ITN) layer. Sites Layer can be used for informed decision-making and spatial analysis, enabling users to answer questions such as: ‘how much of this health centre is at risk of flooding?’.
Ordnance Survey have published clear instructions on how to import the data, which is supplied in GML3 format, into common GIS packages in their Sites Layer Getting Started Guide.
If you have any questions about Sites Layer or Digimap please contact us:
![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)
