[Qgis-user] Public Sector Mapping Agreement

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Andrew

On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Andrew Chapman
<andrew.chapman at donkagen.co.uk> wrote:
> Ordnance Survey is introducing their "Public Sector Mapping Agreement for
> England and Wales" as of 1 April 2011. This is a major change to their
> licensing and will provide free access to OS MasterMap and other layers to
> all public bodies, layers of local government (including the approximately
> 10,000 parish councils)... and also permit free sub-licensing to
> subcontractors. Directly and, indirectly, this could dramatically increase
> the number of potential users of QGIS. Details can be found at
> www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/sectors/government/publicpsmafaq
> s.html.
> I'm a member of a parish council, but am working with the county council
> (plus Environment Agency, Highways Agency, etc) in different areas looking
> at local community sourcing of GIS data, but especially relating to
> flooding.
> To encourage take-up for both GIS and QGIS, it may help if there were
> tutorials to take a new user of GIS through the steps to download data from
> Ordnance Survey (probably only in GZ format for the topology layers).
> To date I've been getting data as shapefiles - when I last tried (an earlier
> version) QGIS wouldn't load .gz and the support for .gml may have been
> incomplete.
> Is anyone else using Ordnance Survey .gz files directly?
> Would the best advice for users new to GIS be to convert to shapefiles or
> use a database (something I've not yet managed to do)?
> Are there any UK users involved with town or parish councils?

Its nice to see OS are freeing *your* data up a little. QGIS has
fairly good support for GML (via GDAL/OGR, the underlying library we
use to read GML). If you encounter specific issues, please let us know
via the bug tracker so that we can try to address them.

It would be really nice to build a collection of standard symbology
files for OS data. As of QGIS 1.7 you will be able to save and share
your new symbology definitions and we are planning a web site to
facilitiate such sharing more broadly.

Regards

Tim

>
> Andrew
>
>
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> Qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
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>



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