Ordnance Survey is introducing their "Public Sector Mapping Agreement for England and Wales" as of 1 April 2011. This is a major change to their licensing and will provide free access to OS MasterMap and other layers to all public bodies, layers of local government (including the approximately 10,000 parish councils)... and also permit free sub-licensing to subcontractors. Directly and, indirectly, this could dramatically increase the number of potential users of QGIS. Details can be found at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/business/sectors/government/publicpsmafaq s.html. I'm a member of a parish council, but am working with the county council (plus Environment Agency, Highways Agency, etc) in different areas looking at local community sourcing of GIS data, but especially relating to flooding. To encourage take-up for both GIS and QGIS, it may help if there were tutorials to take a new user of GIS through the steps to download data from Ordnance Survey (probably only in GZ format for the topology layers). To date I've been getting data as shapefiles - when I last tried (an earlier version) QGIS wouldn't load .gz and the support for .gml may have been incomplete. Is anyone else using Ordnance Survey .gz files directly? Would the best advice for users new to GIS be to convert to shapefiles or use a database (something I've not yet managed to do)? Are there any UK users involved with town or parish councils?
Andrew _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
