Digimap is a

web mapping Web mapping or an online mapping is the process of using, creating, and distributing maps on the World Wide Web (the Web), usually through the use of Web GIS, Web geographic information systems (Web GIS). A web map or an online map is both served ...

and online data delivery service developed by the

EDINA EDINA is a centre for digital expertise, based at the University of Edinburgh as a division of the Information Services Group. Services EDINA front and back ends, front-end services (those accessed directly by the user) are available free at ...

national data centre for UK academia. It offers a range of on-line mapping and data download facilities which provide maps and spatial data from

Ordnance Survey The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...

British Geological Survey The British Geological Survey (BGS) is a partly publicly funded body which aims to advance Earth science, geoscientific knowledge of the United Kingdom landmass and its continental shelf by means of systematic surveying, monitoring and research. ...

Landmark Information Group
an
OceanWise Ltd
Ltd., (marine mapping data and charts from the UK Hydrographic Office)
Getmapping Ltd
the Environment Agency, OpenStreetMap, CollinsBartholomew Ltd, and various other sources. Digimap is available to members of subscribing higher and further education institutions in the UK. The service is free at the point of use but requires individual registration. Institutional subscription fees are based on an institutional banding system devised b
JISC Collections
.

History

Digimap started as a project under th
eLib
(Electronic Libraries) Programme in 1996 offering Ordnance Survey maps to 6 trial universities:

Aberdeen Aberdeen ( ; ; ) is a port city in North East Scotland, and is the List of towns and cities in Scotland by population, third most populous Cities of Scotland, Scottish city. Historically, Aberdeen was within the historic county of Aberdeensh ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. The city is located in southeast Scotland and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh ...

Glasgow Glasgow is the Cities of Scotland, most populous city in Scotland, located on the banks of the River Clyde in Strathclyde, west central Scotland. It is the List of cities in the United Kingdom, third-most-populous city in the United Kingdom ...

Newcastle Newcastle usually refers to: *Newcastle upon Tyne, a city and metropolitan borough in Tyne and Wear, England, United Kingdom *Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire, England, United Kingdom *Newcastle, New South Wales, a metropolitan area ...

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

and

Reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of symbols, often specifically those of a written language, by means of Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifacete ...

. The full service was launched in 2000 and won the AGI Award for Technological Progress in 2000. In mid-2010 Digimap for Schools was launched, providing on-line maps to the schools sector. The service won a Gold Certificate for the best overall resource in the

Geographical Association The Geographical Association (GA) is an association in the United Kingdom. The organisation has a stated aim of improving geographical knowledge of the public through promoting geographical education. Origins The Geographical Association was fo ...

’s 2011 Publishers’ Awards.

Structure

The Digimap service has eleven collections for higher and further education; Ordnance Survey, Historic, Geology, Marine, Environment, Aerial, LiDAR, Global, Society, Verisk, and agCensus. There is also the Digimap for Schools service, which is available to primary and secondary education institutions.

Digimap: Ordnance Survey Collection

When Digimap was first launched this was the only collection of data available. Originally, the service consisted of a simple mapping client, first known as Lite then re-launched as Classic; an advanced mapping facility, Digimap Carto, which is a

Java Applet Java applets were applet, small applications written in the Java (programming language), Java programming language, or another programming language that Compiled language, compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Ja ...

; and a data download facility. Additional facilities for downloading boundary and

postcode A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or numerical digit, digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, inclu ...

data, as well as postcode and gazetteer querying tools, were included later. In 2007 a separate download facility was developed to allow the download of OS MasterMap data. In 2009 the simple mapping client (Classic) was replaced with a new interface, Roam, which makes use of OpenLayers " slippy map" technology.

Historic Digimap

The scanned and georeferenced images of old Ordnance Survey maps were added as a new collection to Digimap in April 2005. The collection was scanned b
Landmark
Information Group and comprises the Ordnance Survey County Series maps and the National Grid maps covering the period up to the release of the digital Land-Line product in 1996. Along with the scanned maps Landmark also created a mosaic for each map series and each of its revisions, these mosaics have then been cut up into the current Ordnance Survey national grid squares. The service originally consisted of a single interface for viewing maps and downloading either the national grid squares or the original scanned sheets as

GeoTIFF GeoTIFF is a public domain metadata standard which allows georeferencing information to be embedded within a TIFF file. The potential additional information includes map projection, coordinate systems, ellipsoids, datums, and everything else nec ...

images. In 2010 a new facility called Ancient Roam was released as a beta service to provide a "slippy maps" style interface for viewing the maps. A separate download interface was also added which allows a greater number of maps to be taken in a single session. At this time the most detailed historic Ordnance Survey maps, the Town Plans, were also offered through the service. A separate viewer for the Dudley Stamp Land-use Survey maps from the 1930s is also included in the collection.

Geology Digimap

Geology Digimap was launched in January 2007 to provide access to

(BGS) mapping data. The service contains the BGS DiGMapGB (Digital Geological Map of Great Britain) Data at three scales: 1:625,000, 1:250,000 and 1:50,000 and uses grey-scale Ordnance Survey mapping as a backdrop for the online mapping facilities. Geology Digimap provides a data download facility in addition to online mapping. This offers the ability to download BGS data for onward use in GIS application software. In 2010 Geology Digimap a new interface, Geology Roam, was developed to enable slippy map browsing, changes in the opacity of the geology over the backdrop mapping and additional zoom levels.

Marine Digimap

Marine Digimap was released in January 2008 and contains

vector Vector most often refers to: * Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction * Disease vector, an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematics a ...

and raster mapping datasets fro
SeaZone
The service offers Hydrospatial data which is a vector data product created from various hydrographic surveys and data agencies. There is also the Charted Raster dataset, which contains scanned and georeferenced Admiralty Charts from the UK Hydrographic Office.

Digimap for Schools

Digimap for Schools was launched by Baroness Joan Hanham CBE, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for

Communities and Local Government The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for housing, communities, and local government in England. It was established in May 2006 ...

and Dr Vanessa Lawrence CB, Director General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey at Graveney School in Wandsworth, London on Wednesday 10 November 2010. The service was offered free to all schools with 11-year-old pupils until the end of 2011, as part of the Free maps for 11-year-olds scheme. The service is very similar to Digimap Roam for Higher Education, allowing teachers and pupils to view the majority of Ordnance Survey's mapping products on-line, and print them out.

Environment Digimap

Environment Digimap, offering the LandCover data from the

Centre for Ecology and Hydrology The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH, also known by the former name CEH) is a centre for excellence in environmental science across water, land and air. The organisation has a long history of investigating, monitoring and modelling envir ...

(CEH), was added to the suite of Digimap services in October 2013. Initially the service only included data for Great Britain but Northern Irish data was included in March 2014.

Aerial Digimap

Aerial Digimap was added to the collections in October 2016. This service has added national coverage of 25 cm resolution aerial images from Getmapping. One key difference between this Digimap Data collection and the others is that it is not Jisc funded and subscriptions are directly with EDINA.

LiDAR Digimap

LiDAR Digimap offers access to

Digital Elevation Model A digital elevation model (DEM) or digital surface model (DSM) is a 3D computer graphics representation of elevation data to represent terrain or overlaying objects, commonly of a planet, Natural satellite, moon, or asteroid. A "global DEM" refer ...

s created by the

Environment Agency The Environment Agency (EA) is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and enha ...

, Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), and

Natural Resources Wales Natural Resources Wales () is a Welsh Government sponsored body, which became operational from 1 April 2013, when it took over the management of the natural resources of Wales. It was formed from a merger of the Countryside Council for Wales, E ...

. This collection was added in 2017.

Global Digimap

Global Digimap was added in 2018 to give Digimap data beyond Great Britain. It contains data from

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae ...

, Natural Earth, and Collins Bartholomew.

Other Collections

Digimap also offers Society Digimap with

socio-economic Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analys ...

data from the

Office for National Statistics The Office for National Statistics (ONS; ) is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, UK Parliament. Overview The ONS is responsible fo ...

, Verisk Digimap with data from

Verisk Analytics Verisk Analytics, Inc. is an American multinational data analytics and risk assessment firm based in Jersey City, New Jersey, with customers in insurance, natural resources, financial services, government, and risk management sectors. The company ...

, and agCensus Digimap providing agricultural census data for Great Britain.

Technology

Digimap uses both

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

and

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...

to provide a range of facilities.

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

and

mapping tools are used to present data from

PostGIS PostGIS ( ) is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). PostGIS is ...

databases via

MapServer MapServer is an open-source development environment for building spatially enabled internet applications, built in the C language, and is widely known as one of the fastest Web mapping engines available. It can run as a CGI program or via MapSc ...

and TileCache ( Tile Map Service) software. Maps from the TileCache and customised maps specified by the user are created on demand using Cadcorp's GeognoSIS software and presented to the user via an OpenLayers and MapFish interface. In 2010 the EDINA Geoservices Team received a "Highly Commended" in the Innovation & Best Practice (Charitable Status) Award from the AGI, for its implementation of its new technical infrastructure. In 200
Snowflake Software's
Go Publisher and an

Oracle An oracle is a person or thing considered to provide insight, wise counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. If done through occultic means, it is a form of divination. Descript ...

database were added to the software supporting the delivery of Ordnance Survey's OS MasterMap GML data. The Digimap service is OGC standards compliant and

is an active member of the

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, Geographi ...

, hosting a meeting in June 2006.

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

edina.ac.uk

digimap.edina.ac.uk

digimapforschools.edina.ac.uk
Digital library projects Geologic maps Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom Ordnance Survey Science and technology in Edinburgh University of Edinburgh Web Map Services