Spaced Out ::

I have been involved in a project looking at detecting urban change from radar imagery and, specifically, the building and demolition of buildings. In order to validate the work we are doing it struck me that Mastermap would be an ideal product to use. TOIDs are used to model features in the landscape and are added, modified and deleted. These can be rolled out to users for an AOI so that an updates to the area can be applied. Of course, the corollary of such a service is that (in Asda speak) you could “roll back” the landscape to a prior point in time to see what the landscape looked like. Or, another way, you could “print” map for a certain point in time. This is potentially a powerful way of looking at urban change and would be very interesting to exploit, except….

I don’t believe OS (or EDINA) offer such a service. When acquiring data it is only ever for the “current release”. This astounds me (although please correct me if I’m wrong) as there must be 101 uses for (recent) historic data. So it would seem that the only way to get temporal snapshots is to get a printed map. Hmmmmm… the wonders of the digital age.