Digimap is a

web mapping Web mapping or an online mapping is the process of using maps, usually created through geographic information systems (GIS), on the Internet, more specifically in the World Wide Web (WWW). A web map or an online map is both served and consumed, ...

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-end services (those accessed directly by the user) are available free at the point of use fo ...

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 Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

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

Landmark Information Group
an
OceanWise Ltd
Ltd., (marine mapping data and charts from the

UK Hydrographic Office The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) is the UK's agency for providing hydrographic and marine geospatial data to mariners and maritime organisations across the world. The UKHO is a trading fund of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and is l ...

)
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 (; sco, Aiberdeen ; gd, Obar Dheathain ; la, Aberdonia) is a city in North East Scotland, and is the third most populous city in the country. Aberdeen is one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas (as Aberdeen City), a ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

Glasgow Glasgow ( ; sco, Glesca or ; gd, Glaschu ) is the most populous city in Scotland and the fourth-most populous city in the United Kingdom, as well as being the 27th largest city by population in Europe. In 2020, it had an estimated popu ...

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

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

and

Reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spell ...

. 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’s 2011 Publishers’ Awards.

Structure

The Digimap service has four collections for higher and further education; Ordnance Survey, Historic, Geology and Marine. 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 small applications written in the Java programming language, or another programming language that compiles to Java bytecode, and delivered to users in the form of Java bytecode. The user launched the Java applet from a ...

; 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, includ ...

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 The OS MasterMap is the premier digital product of the Ordnance Survey. It was launched in November 2001. It is a database that records every fixed feature of Great Britain larger than a few meters in one continuous digital map. Every feature is g ...

data. In 2009 the simple mapping client (Classic) was replaced with a new interface, Roam, which makes use of

OpenLayers OpenLayers is an open-source (provided under the 2-clause BSD License) JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers as slippy maps. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps an ...

" slippy map" technology.

Historic Digimap

The scanned and

georeference Georeferencing means that the internal coordinate system of a map or aerial photo image can be related to a geographic coordinate system. The relevant coordinate transforms are typically stored within the image file (GeoPDF and GeoTIFF are example ...

d 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 necessa ...

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 Sir (Laurence) Dudley Stamp, CBE, DSc, D. Litt, LLD, Ekon D, DSc Nat ( – ), was professor of geography at Rangoon and London, and one of the internationally best known British geographers of the 20th century. Educated at King's College L ...

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 *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

and raster mapping datasets fro
SeaZone
The service offers Hydrospatial data which is a vector data product created from various

hydrographic surveys Hydrographic survey is the science of measurement and description of features which affect maritime navigation, marine construction, dredging, offshore oil exploration/ offshore oil drilling and related activities. Strong emphasis is placed ...

and data agencies. There is also the Charted Raster dataset, which contains scanned and georeferenced

Admiralty Charts Admiralty charts are nautical charts issued by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and subject to Crown Copyright. Over 3,500 Standard Nautical Charts (SNCs) and 14,000 Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) are available with the Admi ...

from the

Digimap for Schools

Digimap for Schools was launched by Baroness Joan Hanham CBE,

Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (or just Parliamentary Secretary, particularly in departments not led by a Secretary of State) is the lowest of three tiers of government minister in the UK government, immediately junior to a Minister ...

for

Communities and Local Government The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), formerly the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for housing, communities, local government i ...

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) is a centre for excellence in environmental science across water, land and air. The organisation has a long history of investigating, monitoring and modelling environmental change, and its science ma ...

(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.

Other Collections

Digimap also offers Global (2019), Society (2019) and Lidar Collections (2017), providing a variety of open and licensed data.

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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

and

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

to provide a range of facilities.

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

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). Technica ...

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 Tile Map Service or TMS, is a specification for tiled web maps, developed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The definition generally requires a URI structure which attempts to fulfill REST principles. The TMS protocol fills a gap between ...

) 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

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 agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

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), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 199 ...

, 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