Staff and students at several education institutions across U.K. are to be given free access to highly detailed Ordnance Survey digital mapping from this month. It is available through the online service, Digimap, provided by EDINA – a datacentre based at the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Digimap allows users to view, print and download maps of any location in Great Britain at a series of pre-defined scales.
Universities are already using Digimap – and the service could provide enormous benefits to the further education community. Thanks to an agreement with JISC, we are able to offer the mapping to end users in further education free-of-charge for the academic year 2005-2006. Our aim is to encourage more students to take advantage of using such highly detailed mapping information and experience the benefits that come with it. As well as being able to view, print and download mapping information for use with appropriate application software, spreadsheets and databases, users can query and display postcodes or place names. And more advanced mapping facilities allow staff and students to overlay different map products and print maps up to A0 size. JISC is planning an online delivery service for OS MasterMap – Ordnance Survey’s latest generation of intelligent geographic information.
