Monthly Archives: March 2016

5 posts

A tale of two datasets

This is a tale of two datasets – an open data set and a free dataset. Last Tuesday at GeoMob, Anna Powell-Smith gave an absolutely brilliant talk about the work that she had done with Private Eye to uncover the extent of foreign company ownership of UK property. It wasn’t straight forward as the Land registry seems to be reluctant to make the data available (there is a lot more than raw Land Registry data in […]

Ordnance Survey are pretty damn good at Derived Data exemptions

For those who are not clued up about the fine detail of derived data and exemption requests, the OS maintains that some data sets produced by it’s licensees may incorporate elements of OS data and thus be classified as derived data. If this is the case (most frequently where OS geometry is directly traced in the licensee’s data e.g. BLPU’s and planning application boundaries) then the licensee needs to request a derived data exemption under the […]

Drip, drip, drip – OS OpenWashing

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of the Ordnance Survey and that I have many friends who work there or have worked there. Ordnance Survey’s detail, precision, currency and quality of mapping are the envy of many other countries and most of their staff seem to be dedicated to producing ever improving digital map products as their public task. So you are waiting for the ‘but’ and it is a big ‘but’. There […]

QGIS 2.14 LTR – how Open Source works

Monday was an exciting day for open source geo geeks. The QGIS community announced the release of QGIS 2.14 LTR the latest and hopefully greatest QGIS release. You can get a sense of what the release contains by looking at the comprehensive Change Log. When I started to look through the change log I couldn’t help but smile, it illustrated perfectly how the collaborative open source development and business model worked for the whole community. Let […]

A 404 message

I got a couple of these messages when I recently moved my website to a new host, which prompted lots of export/import/backup and hacky things. Along the way I noticed that since I first started writing this GIScussion stuff in November 2006, I have published 404 posts. That’s a lot of enthusing, babbling and ranting on geo topics and things open. Hopefully I have still got a few things to say before the 10th birthday later this […]