Local councils in the United Kingdom

UK Government and Local Councils use maps extensively across many areas of operation: planning department, highways department, refuse collection, etc, etc. For many years they have been compelled (by the "mapping services agreement") to license Ordnance Survey map products at great expense. The Ordnance Survey Opendata announcements will no doubt bring about some fundamental changes in the way this works, but even before that, some forward-looking local councils experimented with using other map providers particularly for public facing online web mapping.

OpenStreetMap offers some very interesting possibilities in this area, not just as a provider of raster maps, but as a platform for engaging with local communities for gathering detailed map data, and presenting it back to them in interesting and useful ways. Feel free to use this page to flesh out some ideas for how local councils can do this.

Government use of OpenStreetMap data

OpenStreetMap use of Government resources

In the second half of the 2000s (decade), the Open Data movement grew increasingly loud. This led to the appointment of Sir Tim Berners Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt to oversee the release of data sets from various UK Government departments and the new data.gov.uk website. Many of these data sets are released under the new Open Government Licence, allowing royalty-free and commercial use of the data, including with OpenStreetMap.

This section discusses government data that may be of use within OpenStreetMap. It is split by data that has been released under a licence that is compatible with OpenStreetMap's licence and other data that is currently only available by request.

How else can the government help?

Get the community mapping! Councils could help us run mapping parties (even if just through room hire).

List of UK Councils

Contact details, lists of members (useful for lobbying) and other information on each council may be found on Openly Local.

OpenStreetMap Development Platform in general

The above ideas are more around end uses. There are some ideas we could work on before that though to make it easier to build end-use apps. These ideas are not really specific to UK councils, but considering council-sized areas of data presents some interesting possibilities.

Turn NOVAM into something that can be used to check any specified POI data, including imports

Extract server

• A basic extract server. Extract greater london.
• Pull in updates (minutely?)
• Extract individual boroughs by their boundary=administrative outlines
  • Enhanced features for trimming edges off a polygon extract?
  • boundary=administrative error checker?

Extract formats

Shapefiles, Garmin IMGs, GPX POIs. These have been done before (see planet.osm#Extracts)

A small area like a London borough would allow us to convert to other formats. Could be interesting to build these into an extract server:

SVG, PDF (MapOSMatic?), Adobe Illustrator, DXF. Other ideas see Converting map data between formats

XAPI-like tag extracts

(but avoiding trying to install XAPI!) Again this is nicely simplified by considering an area the size of a borough:

• Extend extract server to also provide various tag extracts.
  • e.g. Extract all shops. Extract all bus stops. Extract all recycle bins.
  • Multiple themed tags in one download? e.g. for kids: schools, play areas, youth clubs. Low Carbon Zones showing all renewables
• A useful (but optional) format simplification might be to convert POIs mapped as areas (e.g. schools) back to single nodes (centrepoints)
• POI formats: GeoRSS, KML, GPX, Tabular CSV data.

Visualising XAPI-like results

Having built above features we'd want out-of-the box OpenLayers (or Mapstraction?) configs or at least sample code for easily hooking up to it and seeing the results. e.g. all school POIs as markers on a slippy map. Maybe take ideas from NaPTAN/Novam ()

Great case studies

West Midlands gritting routes map - blog and map

NaPTAN data import (bus stops, etc.)

Ordnance Survey Opendata being traced / imported / etc.

Surrey Air Survey to provide free aerial photography of Surrey for tracing by councils and OSM volunteers.