Mapping Hacks

Last Thursday’s Forum on open geodata in central London went fascinatingly. The CTO of the Ordnance Survey attended, as did apparently the head of their PR department, and a cluster of GIS policy advisory professionals, and a veritable collective of UK open map hackers.
Further information including slides and a sound recording are provided. The Open […]

Those in or near London might be interested in the next in the series of Open Knowledge Forums, on the subject of Open Geodata. Speakers feature Roger Longhorn, who has written interestingly on GIS ethics and on European geodata policy, Gesche Schmid, director of GIS at Medway Council, Steve Coast of openstreetmap, Giles Lane of […]

Reality is what the maps tell us, whether or not that reflects reality on the ground.
In Ireland it is now illegal for the Ordnance Survey to use
English names on maps of certain areas.

The question of what a place should be called brings forth issues of control and domination, freedom and self determination, throwing off the […]

This press release, reposted to the EGIP list, made me yelp:
Ordnance Survey lobbies MEPs over INSPIRE wording
Tho it doesn’t mention the proposed INSPIRE directive by name, it illustrates the semi-privatised UK National Mapping Agency’s commercial obsession and greedy monopoly fairly clearly:

“We need to remove any ambiguity in the wording, as it would be a disaster […]

We’ve been given permission by O’Reilly to distribute Jo’s “What To Do If
Your Government Is Hoarding Geodata” hack from the book under a Creative Commons
NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. We felt that it was important that this
bit of research on Jo’s part be freely available to anyone interested in
understanding the global state of geospatial data access policy - […]