The growth in Ordnance Survey GPS has recently started to build a head of steam and now the UK government has announced that the map data will be available for free online in 2010. This has the potential for so many uses it would be impossible to list them all, but some will be jumping for joy over this move. Thanks to Austin for the link.
“The UK Government has announced that Ordnance Survey map data will be freely available online to everybody from 2010.
The objective is to join the dots between what, when and in this case where and allow people to automatically link and interpret public statistics about crime, health and education by postcode, local authority or electoral boundary. This will be achieved by allowing developers to use information and stats on various subjects to be linked to OS maps to create hybrid enriched web information pages. It will able people to see all the things that are happening in a given location such as traffic accidents, speeding offences and car thefts.
According to Stephen Timms, Minister for Digital Britain, 80% of public sector data refers to a location and hence to a map…”
