Here Be Dragons (original) (raw)

kaberett needs to create a geological survey of a few square kilometres of the Lake District this summer. She wants to record observations in the field on paper then transcribe them to a computer somewhere less generally rugged.

To this end, she wants a series of sheets of A4 card, each printed with a National Grid kilometre square of base map. For convenience, this would be at either 1:10,000 (10cm×10cm) or 1:5,000 (20cm×20cm) scale.

She has access to the Edina Digimap OS collection, but their OS Explorer map (1:25,000) squares exploded by a factor of 2½ are pretty pixelated — and give the impression of being a re-scan from paper sheets in any case.

I've just taken a look at OS OpenData and downloaded the "OS Street View", "OS VectorMap District (Raster)" and "OS VectorMap District (Vector)" data for a specimen square: the VectorMap raster is cleaner and more detailed than Edina, but lacks paths, fences and — most crucially — contours; the StreetView is still cleaner and more detailed, and does at least have private tracks, but lacks spot heights as well as contours. So far as I can tell without a program that understands it properly, the VectorMap vector data is similar to the raster.

Do any of you know some more effective way to drive either Edina or OS OpenData? Alternatively, is there some other source of mapping data that would be more appropriate?