emapsite has today launched a new service that lets individuals and businesses order and download extracts of OS OpenData products.

April 06, 2010 — The service, at www.free-os-maps.com, follows a widely anticipated government announcement opening up some of Ordnance Survey’s digital mapping data sets to unlimited usage.

emapsite, a leading supplier of hosted mapping content for professional users, is offering instant access to many of the datasets involved in the policy change.

The service provides a solution to all those users hungry for these data sets but facing the challenges of easily selecting and obtaining what they need for their areas of interest.

The key data sets include the boundary ‘reference geography’ OS Boundary Line. This is one of the frameworks by which citizens, hackers, government, enterprise and the third sector can aggregate and analyse the ever increasing volumes of other data such as that from www.data.gov.uk.

The terrain data set OS Landform PANORAMA, which is available from emapsite as contours and grids, is used by renewable energy and other enterprises to understand landscape at a useful scale.

Other datasets included in the OS OpenData portfolio from emapsite are:

• OS MiniScale (a small scale backdrop map)
  
• OS 1:250 000 scale colour raster (a backdrop map with more detail)
  
• OS StreetView (1:10000 scale street mapping with building blocks and most street names)
  
• Meridian-2 (1:50 000 scale vector map base used for creating different versions - styles, content, themes - of established paper map series and for filling in OpenStreetMap)
  
• Strategi (1:250 000 scale vector map base, also useful for creating new versions of established map series)

The emapsite service is available for a small fee and users requiring full national coverage as opposed to extracts will be advised to contact the company directly.

James Cutler, CEO at emapsite, said: “As a partner of Ordnance Survey for more than ten years, we are experts in adding value to its data for customers in different sectors.

“We are delighted to launch our new service which reflects the evolution of public sector information thinking and will help to widen access to free mapping for those who want it.

“We applaud the government announcement and look forward to contributing to an explosion of map based ‘applications’ that use these frameworks to educate and inform their communities of interest.”

emapsite’s mapshop model allows users to define extract against familiar map backdrop, choose the product they want and, for all but the largest areas, to download it within minutes. The new solution builds on this architecture and allows emapsite to provide long term service integrity, updated data and data management tools for these data sets at a very modest cost.

Ordnance Survey is just one source of the mapping content hosted and provided by emapsite through data feeds and added-value location intelligence solutions.

As well as supplying the UK’s biggest portfolio of digital maps for professional users, emapsite offers aerial photography, consultancy services and a suite of environmental, surface and geological reports.

Customers include surveyors, utility companies, estate agents, consulting engineers, site investigators and other property and environmental professionals.