[GRASS-user] Obtaining map files

[Paul Bivand]

UK maps remain problematic. While there seems to some possibility of changing 
the regime that requires the Ordnance Survey to recoup its costs from Users 
(mostly other bits of government) this hasn't happened yet.

However, the Office for National Statistics doesn't have the same requirements 
and has some vector boundaries freely available. However, this is free as in 
cost not free as in software, and the licence precludes stepping too hard on 
Ordnance Survey's toes. Therefore boundaries are only available for 
ONS-originated geographies - Census Output areas and Super Output areas. 
There are lookup tables to local authority and various other boudary sets, 
but Ordnance Survey owns the definitive boudary sets for higher level 
geographies. 

The relevant ONS web page is here

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/boundaries.asp

Paul Bivand

On Friday 21 Mar 2008, andy wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 11:34 PM, andy <geek_show at dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> >> Hello all
> >>
> >>  I'm wanting to obtain image files with which to start proceeding beyond
> >>  the spearfish files that are the default.
> >
> > there is a new dataset available: OSGeo Edu dataset, North Carolina
> > http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php
> >
> >> Specifically, I'm looking for  images for the UK.
> >
> > It's not easy to find free European data. What do you specifically look
> > for? Some pointers:
> >
> > http://openaerialmap.org/
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/
> > http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geodata_Repository
> >
> > Best
> > Markus
>
> Thanks Markus
>
> I'll follow those links to see what I can come up with. I am looking
> particularly for images for SE London, but these do seem quite hard to
> locate. I was under the impression the British Ordinance Survey office
> had released their data to the public domain since we pay for it in our
> taxes, but I could be wrong.
>
> If anything else occurs to you or others on this list, please don't be
> shy about letting me know.
>
> Many thanks
>
> Andy