UK Mapping Data - and more to come - under government Open Data measures
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-12-03 08:59:36 - Graham Ellis
Data that's been paid for by the taxpayer should be available to the taxpayer / public. Seems obvious, but it hasn't actually been the case in many instances. But in the last few months, the Government's Open Data measures have been moving us along towards more public availability of data that should be available.It's not quite public domain - so I need to tell you that this map is based on OS data, and point you to a license [here]. But if you read that license, you'll find that I can abstract, adapt, re-use and include in my commercial product without payment of fees, though I must pass on the license or reference to it.
I've put other maps up on our web site too as a demonstration - Big Street map including Melksham - and I've only just started to explore that data that's available ... I'm going to be going on to look at Code Point Open, for example, which includes a mapping for all UK postcodes to OS Grid references. The list of valid postcodes alone will provide an excellent improvement to our validators, and there are all sites of exciting prospects by mapping them on top of the street and other OS maps.