April 2010 – Page 2

Forests of Great Britain

From the OS OpenData’s Meridian 2 dataset, which was released under a free licence today, here is the extent of forest cover across Great Britain – there is a dedicated polygon shapefile within the distribution showing just this:

As a general rule for orienteering, areas with good forest cover have the best orienteering maps. Scotland and Wales beat England hands down for cover, although Surrey’s doing not too badly at all. The rule doesn’t always hold though – there’s a big patch near Cambridge – more so, it appears than the Lake District, but the latter is considerably finer for orienteering in.

The map contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2010.

OS OpenData is here

It’s the first of April – but it’s not an April Fool – lots of Ordnance Survey medium-scale data has been released today, under a licence compatible with Creative Commons’ Attribution, i.e. you can do what you like with it as long as you attribute and don’t misrepresent the data source.

The best mirror for the data I’ve found is at MySociety – the OS’s own servers have been apparently overloaded since the release went live.

The first use I’ve made of the data is taking the “CodePoint Open” set of postcodes and locations, I’m now using this data as the postcode lookup for OpenOrienteeringMap. If you type in a UK postcode there, it should now take you to exactly the right place. Before, the lookup was using NPEmap data, which was pretty good in general, but someone did spot some glaring errors when they were using it, coincidently, yesterday.

The attribution statement, by the way, can be seen by mousing over the “Jump to Postcode” text.