[Talk-GB] More news on local council data

[Andy Robinson]

On 10/12/2007, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've asked the GIS team at Sutton Borough Council about using any data
> they have, mainly for a project I'm doing at work in partnership with
> the Council.
>
> They said that ALL of their data is derived from the OS maps under the
> Mapping Service Agreement. They don't apparently even have their own
> data for the Borough and ward boundaries. According to them, the MSA
> means that they can only share the data with another organisation for
> the duration of our project.
>
> This is a bit disappointing - it means we have to get ALL of the data
> ourselves by hand!
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions? For example other departments in the
> council that might have relevant data, especially for political
> boundaries. Did anything come of the data that Frederik Ramm mentioned
> earlier this month? I find getting accurate administrative boundaries by
> hand a complete pain because those signs are few and far between!
>
> Looks like we'll be organising a series of Sutton mapping weekends to
> get the Borough finished...
>
> Kind regards,
> Tom
>
>
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I'm not at all surprised by this state of affairs. Councils use the
tools at their disposal and clearly being able to represent something
geographical is always going to be done on an OS base map, thus always
restricted to the terms of the service agreement.

All is not however lost in that a lot of historical data exists in our
libraries which can be consulted free of charge. A lot of the very old
data is in text form and not tied to a map. If it is tied to a map
then its very possibly going to be out of copyright. While most
libraries in my experience don't permit photocopying of their maps it
shouldn't be too onerous to take in a copy of OSM mapping and to then
trace onto that the information gleaned from the historical documents.
A laborious manual process it may be, but I suspect and interesting
and rewarding one nevertheless. Something for the cold winter months
maybe.

Cheers

Andy
-- 
Andy Robinson