Systeme D

14 December 2007

World's best mapping still not on the web



The Ordnance Survey yesterday launched a closed alpha of their OpenSpace API, basically bringing Google Maps-like functionality to OS mapping.

Most of the obvious has already been said - great idea, good to see OS opening up a little, looks smart technically (it's using a neatly hacked version of OpenLayers), but maybe too late, and the non-commercial clause sucks big non-commercial rocks. And the little lawyer-infested notes everywhere saying that "JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems" are quite brilliantly "we still don't really get it" naive.

But the biggest disappointment is that you won't see the image above. For the higher zoom levels, OS have chosen to use their utterly anonymous StreetView mapping, which is a not-particularly-great raster set of images exactly like the street mapping on Google Maps. (StreetView is probably actually worse than the Google tiles, because it's clearly derived from a rich dataset with a fairly random set of features left in. So you'll often see the text "Disused railway" in the middle of nowhere, but without the actual line showing where the railway goes.)

This is really dumb. It means the whole project stands or falls on the Landranger (1:50k) mapping, because that's all that differentiates it from being YAmapping API - and Multimap already offer Landranger tiles through their own API.

So what's the alternative? The Explorer rasters (1:25k), as shown above. This provides countryside mapping par excellence, and really shows how they can offer more than the "just streets" approach of TeleAtlas/Navteq etc. Offering the Explorer maps would have Britain's walkers beating a path to your door, and be a nice plus for other countryside-focused sites like Geograph.

(There's precedent for this: OS's largely-forgotten Get-a-Map consumer mapping site does provide the Explorer set, but, of course, no API.)

The API doesn't go public until next year, so hopefully there's time for the Explorer tiles to be added.

Comments

lwEGDj Wow, it can be truth

Posted by Kandoras on 22.12.07 14:39

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