Dan Karran writes that he has received an official, recent (2007) dataset from the Isle of Man government, comprising of a 1:25000 raster with tourist points of interest (POIs), and detailed satellite imagery from 2001, with a licence suitable for tracing into OpenStreetMap. This is great for OpenStreetMap and for the Isle of Man. Although the data doesn’t include individual house shapes, and other fine detail that wouldn’t be on a 1:25000 map, it does allow for complete coverage of the island with a level of detail suitable for routing, POI-finding and landuse mapping.
Now, if the Ordnance Survey could be persuaded to do the same thing for a test area in Great Britain, such as Caithness?