Great Britain is an island in its own right, but aside from the mainland, there are hundreds of islands around the British coast, many uninhabited*. Inspired by David Garcia’s data visualisation of the Philippines, our GeoDataViz team worked with Alasdair Rae at the University of Sheffield to explore Britain’s largest islands.
They found that there are 82 English, Scottish and Welsh islands larger than 5km2. Scotland boasts the vast majority with 71, not surprising when you consider the Outer Hebrides, Shetland and Orkney and other beautiful islands off the coast. Wales had just 2 entries and England 9.
They are some of the oldest photographs ever taken of the ancient Stonehenge landmark and the book in which they are bound dates back to 1867. It’s a chronicle which until now has been lost in the archives of the national mapping agency Ordnance Survey.
From an original albumen print in the 1867 book ‘Plans and Photographs of Stonehenge and of Turusachan in the Island of Lewis; with notes relating to the Druids and Sketches of Cromlechs in Ireland, by Colonel Sir Henry James, Director General of the Ordnance Survey
Today marks 227 years since Ordnance Survey was founded. On 21 June 1791, the Board of Ordnance purchased a new Ramsden theodolite, and this is seen as the foundation of our organisation. A lot has changed in those 227 years: we moved from London to Southampton; we went from mapping for the military to mapping for people, businesses and the government; from mapping Kent (our first map published in 1801) to a geospatial database of Great Britain with over 460 million features…the list goes on.
We’ve also had a few different looks over the years, as you can see in our evolution of OS brand logos below.
As part of the Prime Minister’s London Tech Week round-table event, earlier this week the Government announced that key parts of OS MasterMap will be made openly available for the public and businesses to use. The announcement is one of the first projects to be delivered by the Geospatial Commission in conjunction with us.
We are looking forward to supporting the Geospatial Commission in making this data more accessible and more widely used to continue our open data journey. In 2010 we launched OS Opendata and since then, we have continued to invest in new open data products and initiatives to enable innovation and growth in the digital economy. Over the past eight years we have seen our open data downloaded 1.9 million times. On average, 150 people download OS OpenData every day. That’s 54,750 people a year. Here is a quick trip through our open data journey highlighting some of the key milestones.
In partnership with the UK Space Agency and Oxford Innovation, we hosted a workshop for the Oxford Innovation Space Incubator programme earlier this year. This involved inviting the next generation of thinkers at the forefront of technological innovation to come up with “ground breaking ideas with the potential to change the world”.
The challenge they chose to accept was to develop new business ideas using raw GNSS signals from the Android mobile operating system.
We have to say, the Northumbrian Water Group Innovation Festival is a truly unique event. It focuses on several societal and environmental issues and, throughout the five day festival, those involved apply design thinking techniques to try and solve them.
Naturally, we have jumped at the chance to get involved. As geospatial data and mapping experts, we are addressing the issue of whether an underground map of the UK can be created. As part of the ‘Combined Underground Infrastructure Map’, we will be leading a sprint team to explore the possibility and consequent benefits of creating a collaborative underground dataset and map of the UK.
Are you a local authority, a utility company or a highways agency with underground assets? If so, you may be interested in our Project Iceberg industry workshop on 27 June.
Project Iceberg is a collaborative project between us, the British Geological Survey (BGS) and Future Cities Catapult (FCC) to explore how to better capture, collect and share data about underground assets and geological conditions.
OS is Britain's mapping agency. We make the most up-to-date and accurate maps of the country. But we're also a digital business, and we use our content to help governments, companies and individuals to be more effective both here and around the world.