Spaced Out ::

The Guardian covered the news piece today on the government announcement to release over 2,000 datasets for public consumption, including (some) Ordnance Survey data down to 1:10,000. As ever the detail will be interesting to read and it probably won’t include MasterMap. That said the sheer scale of the announcement is remarkable and “possibly includes all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences.” Will it include address data for geocoding?? Who knows, but that’s a biggie.

The Guardian page, funnily, also has a picture of a surveyor out with an (Leica RTK?) GPS hooked up to a laptop with the following caption:
“A cartographer out and about while mapping for the Ordnance Survey”

Whilst at its broadest definition cartography does include this (”science and art of map making”), I sure most cartographers wouldn’t think of this as their Raison d’être.And perhaps more funnily the DCLG page notes the date as “17 noviembre 2009.” What are people drinking today?!