First I should disclose I worked on developing mapping the Vision of Britain site but I tried really hard to avoid being involved in the political side of things!
On Jan 7, 2008 10:39 AM, Tim Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 14:43 +0000, Barry Hunter wrote: > > On 07/01/2008, Tim Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 07:54 +0000, Andrew Larcombe wrote: > > > > On 7 Jan 2008, at 04:21, Tim Bowden wrote: > > > > > > > > > Thanks. Looks like I can probably get what I need from their wms. > > > > > > > > > > > > FWIW, it looks like their wms server comes out of edina who are the > > > > suppliers of the academic datasets as mentioned originally. > > > > > > Yes. According to the visionofbritain.org.uk web site about page: "This > > > web site was created by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project". From > > > what I could gather from reading both sites, it appears they have may > > > have been created from separate funding projects though. It would seem > > > the historiccountiestrust.co.uk effort at digitising the county > > > boundaries is duplicating what almost certainly already exists in the > > > gbhg effort, but hasn't been made public because nobody funded them to > > > make it public. As far as I understood the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) part of the Lottery paid us to make the site for the public, so what ever is on the VOB site is public. > > > > > > > The more I look at visionofbritain the more data I realise is hidden > > away in there (I didnt realise they had boundary data) > > > > There's lots there. Two hundred years of census data, boundaries for > almost all of the census areas over that time, scans of countless maps. I know that for a while the British Library (who were partners) who scanned their maps tried to claim the copyright on the scans of the maps but we refused to believe that scanning a map was sufficient to give you a copyright. It's been a while but I could probably drag up the references to the original case law - it was something to do with pictures of works of art some museum was arguing they owned copyright on. > > > Now heres an off the wall idea (maybe ;), could WE fund them to make it > > public. > > > > I'm sure it's worth pursuing. Given the work was publicly funded, I > imagine the costs *shouldn't* be too much beyond the cost of provision. > There is a note on both sites that if you're not academic don't bother > asking for the data, unless you're interested in a commercial > arrangement. Perhaps they have visions of reaping huge dividends from > their publicly funded work. > The biggest problem is that all the data is living in an Oracle database which is used under an academic license - thus saving us about (as I recall) half a million pounds a year. If we did anything commercial with the data we would need to buy a commercial Oracle license which for any reasonably sized machine is prohibitively expensive, or rewrite the system to use Postgis which would require programmer time the project doesn't have. The other problem is that the various projects who's data has been assembled into the database gave it to the the GBHGIS under a variety of restrictions but often required us/them not to give it away. > > Certainly worth a shot, but I suspect there's a decent dose of academic > politics to be dealt with before it pays off. Call me a sceptic, but I > can't see them giving up something of unique value too easily. It'll be > a long road methinks. I suspect the nascent UK chapter of OSGeo would > also like to get involved in such an effort. > I think we reached the best possible release of as much data as possible to as many people as possible as we could considering the funding we had. You get unlimited access to a WMS with all the parishes, counties and multitude of other boundaries in GB through time with Census data attached. See if you can find something similar for any other country in the world? -- Ian Turton http://www.geotools.org http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
