July 16, 2004
OS Master Map
via wmmna
Ordnance Survey, Britain's national mapping agency, started 30 years ago to build a database of Britain's landscape and society. MasterMap contains 450m topographical features, each positioned to an accuracy of centimetres.
From the Master Map website:
The OS MasterMap Topography Layer is a large-scale digital database of the detailed surface features on the landscape, with relative positions and elevations of every town, manor, parish, or tract of land mapped to minute detail. This highly accurate, flexible resource covers some 400 million man-made and natural features, from fields to pillar boxes, each with its own unique identifier or TOIDŽ for easy reference. It is broken down into nine themes to make it easier to access the data:Guardian Master Map article --------------------------roads, tracks and paths;
land;
buildings;
water;
rail;
height;
heritage;
structures; and
administrative boundaries.There is the choice of a single theme, a combination of themes or all of the above. When overlaid with other OS MasterMap layers or the customer's own data, it will provide a clear picture of what's on the ground.
Britain has gotta be a pretty fun place for AR now.
Posted by brad at July 16, 2004 12:26 PMComments
Unfortunately the data is not free to the public as it is in the States, despite a proportion being funded by public money.
Posted by: Timo at July 16, 2004 12:42 PM
Hmmm... sounds Situationist. Overlaying of maps with different information. I imiagine due the amount of information it'll take years before we see a simliar system for the US. It's really great that this has been going on for 200 years. Two centuries of information, only a drop in history's bucket but still so much information.
From the looks of this article the AR buzz is starting to hit main stream culture?! I wonder how it will be accepted by the average (wo)man.
Posted by: SEDinehart at July 16, 2004 12:43 PM
This is very nice. I've heard of some people trying to do similar layering systems in a non-digital manner here, basicaly embedding layers into the same physical construction, each layer accessed by viewing the map from a different angle (or something like that). You can imagine the possibility of this type of layering for location-embedded, dynamic media content...
Posted by: will at July 16, 2004 07:31 PM
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