Style sheets available for all our vector products
Ordnance Survey has developed and released a full set of style sheets for all its vector products, including OS MasterMap Topography Layer and OS VectorMap Local. The new style sheets, an addition to the initial release of a set of OS OpenData Styled Layer Descriptors (SLDs) released in December 2012, will make it easier for users to ‘plug in and play’ and build Ordnance Survey maps into their web services or geographical information system (GIS).
Made available under an open licence, SLDs are commonly used in conjunction with a web server to style data for a web map service (WMS). They have been developed in an open structured format that will easily enable conversion to desktop GIS readable style sheets.
Styling applied using QGIS software
Increasingly customers and partners need to present our vector products in a suitable raster style, for their Intranet service for example; that can be quite a time consuming process. We have created the SLDs to help reduce the time and resource needed to properly apply cartographic styling for web and GIS visualisation and enable their products to reflect the Ordnance Survey style and feel.
SLD’s can be accessed on our website at:
This page is linked to from each individual product page and the Public Sector news area of our website. Links to SLDs are also available on the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) home page.
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The example picture shows styling applied in QGIS, I have tried applying the styling on MasterMap using the available SLDs but it isn’t read by QGIS correctly and only displays the first line.
Other “unofficial” incomplete SLDs on the internet work in QGIS. I haven’t tested the SLDs in Geoserver yet.
Hi Steven
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve passed it along to our technical team to investigate and will come back to you when I have a response.
Thanks, Gemma
Hi Steven in some of the SLDs. In the web map servers that these SLDs have been primarily built for, these tags are used to correctly order the different features so that certain lines (for instance) will always take precedence over other lines. We have found that if you remove the multiple tags to create one single with multiple tags then QGIS will display more than one feature type when it interprets the SLD. We will look to communicate with QGIS to investigate the possibility of moving forward any changes that they may be able to consider.
Thanks again for bringing this to our notice. Following some investigation by our technical team, it seems that not all aspects of the SLD specification are supported by QGIS. In this case, the problem originates from the use of more than one
Thanks again, Gemma
There is a problem with SLD to QML. We have converted the SLDs to QML suitable for QGIS:
http://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/resources/styling-os-opendata-in-qgis
The Link to the converted sld files into ones that can be read by QGIS doesn’t work. Would it be possible to redirect me? I need style sheets for OS topology map.
Thanks
Hi Katharine
Sorry about that, we’ve updated the link now to take you to the right page.
Thanks, Gemma
I have tried to use these SLD with Geoserver 2.5 but even though they validate when you submit them to the application I get a file io error
Hi Mark
Our Customer Services team are best placed to look into this for you. Please could you email them on customerservices@ordnancesurvey.co.uk or call on 08456 050505.
Many thanks
Gemma