In case you missed last weeks press release from PBBI, you can now read it here.
“The need for citizen self-services and increased transparency, combined with reduction around costs and inefficiency are driving wider mainstream adoption of location-based data, and fuelling the appetite for geospatial data on-demand in the UK public sector, according to Pitney Bowes Business Insight, the leading global provider of location intelligence, data management and customer communication management solutions.”
DaaS – Public Sector Driving Data On Demand
Chris M
OS Open Data, Now available from PBBI in TAB Format
Following up from my earlier post that PBBI would be making available the recent OS Open data available in TAB format. I’m pleased to say this is now available, and if you’d like to take advantage of this please click on the following link:
Click here to request free OS Open data in MapInfo Tab format
If you’re already an OS customer with PBBI you should have already received an email with the links on it so no need to do that twice. You will also see all the information required on our website.
As a reminder the following products are now available under the OS OpenData project without restriction on use – (and yes we’re going to be adding some of these to MapInfo Stratus soon!)
• OS Street View®
• 1:50 000 Gazetteer
• 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster
• OS Locator™
• Boundary-Line™
• Code-Point® Open
• Meridian™ 2
• Strategi®
• MiniScale®
• OS VectorMap™ District (available 1 May 2010)
• Land-Form PANORAMA®
If you require any further information please feel free to contact your account manager or one of the team on:
+44 1753 848200
Happy Mapping!
Chris M
OS OpenData - Coming in MapInfo format from PBBI
At the start of the month the Ordnance Survey brought us the news of some free – yes free – data. PBBI like many of you have downloaded that data to take a look. The first thing you’ll notice is that it doesn’t come in MapInfo TAB format! So our data team have spent a few days squirreling away to convert everything over to tabs. Meanwhile our Product Manager for data, Ban Tawfik, has decided that as we’ve done that, we’d like to offer that data to you in Tab format.
So if you’d like to recieve any of the OS OpenData sets free of charge in Tab format we will be providing a link in a number of places with instructions (including here). We are expecting to have that available within the next few days so stay tuned!
Chris M
Interesting image here: from an online data storage company got me thinking about mapping data. Quite often this is shipped around on physical media. Got me thinking about mapping data, as lets face it – it often takes up a fair bit of disc space.
By my guesstimates a typical UK local government may have the following (please by all means tell me I’m wrong)
OS MasterMap – 10GB
Other OS datasets – 15GB
Business Data - 50GB
I’ve taken into account that some of this may also be stored in a couple of places or file formats. Perhaps this estimate is conservative, either way 75GB of mapping data per local authority. Multiply that by the 400 (ish) local authroities (in England and Wales) comes in at a whopping 28,000 GB or data. In mp3 terms that is 14498 days, 19 hours, 53 minutes, 14 seconds – 463962 albums (at an estimated 45 minutes per album @ 192kbps)
Burn all that to physical media and you are talkinga lot of discs:
Guess at the amount of spatial data in UK local gov
Whats my point? This is a rough estimation based on one government sector – throw in Emergency Services, PCT’s, Housing Authorities etc and there is a lot of mapping data out there. Are we still sending and receiving a lot of this mapping data on physical media? If so why – is there a better way? The answer is yes and web services allow us to share that data and we are seeing it happen. Would love to here views on physical vs digital delivery and ways in which Spatial communities are sharing data.
Cheers
Mark
