I’ve been a bit lazy about this recently and Tom Goskar’s trumped me on this one. Geospatial data is central to the Scheme’s work; without it every single piece of information that we collect is worthless. Provenance is king for archaeological work, if you don’t know where something came from then you might as well ignore it. To facilitate the contextualisation of the artefact data, we need to be able to plot our co-ordinates onto decent maps and this is an area where I feel we are severely hampered. Around May 2005, the Scheme signed up to the Pan Government Agreement, which would have allowed us to use the Ordnance Survey’s brilliant and highly accurate maps free; however this arrangement was under review and we simply couldn’t afford the bill. We therefore returned the box of cds to the OS and have therefore had a low level mapping client available on our database system. Andrew Larcombe and the dev team at OAD have been working on creating an interface for our system with Google maps which meets their license agreement (see earlier post) and this has many implications for us.
As Tom says, the campaign being run by the Guardian is of great interest to me, and I read it via RSS and follow the technology section when I can (I read the Telegraph as the sport is miles ahead!) At present, the Museum doesn’t qualify for usage of EDINA resources, which is surely a strange situation to be in.
Within the Museum, I have been making use of the useful fGIS programme that I downloaded a couple of years ago (it is the only one I can run from an executable on any pc) and this has allowed us to do some pretty good GIS analysis of patterns and typologies of artefacts. Now if we could get better resolution maps, then we could extend this and understand the information in a much better manner. What would be really useful is to harness several “pay for the goods” services, such as the postcode dataset. We could then allow users of the PAS system to query our database via their postcode as well as their co-ordinates, parish, district or whatever they identify (with the results microformatted as they are returned for lat and long.)
The article that Tom quoted has a snippet from Ed Parson’s CTO (microformat your template for geolocation) of the OS:
“It shows things like footpaths, which are possibly not on the equivalent Google or Yahoo! maps. It’s a Google Maps for the UK. If people can develop applications for ramblers, those ideas could be turned into commercial applications.”
This throws up other problems though:
- are landowners prepared for high level precise mapping of their land with extra information that adds value?
- How would they feel if we use this high res imagery for analysis of archaeological finds?
- Does this pose a security risk for heritage and scheduled of productive sites?
- There’s no doubt more….
Safe guards would have to be applied, maybe deliberate shifting of the point data when represented on the printout.
As all public sector organisations are feeling the squeeze, I can see why the OS needs to bring in some much needed funding. High quality public resources should be funded by the state, but should also allow for other public bodies fair usage. They need adequate funding to compete with private companies and maintain the high standards that they have set.
We’ll no doubt see this unfold over time….. perhaps this will have implications for resources such as the Ancient World Mapping Centre? I’m not sure yet what they can get from the OS maps, but I believe there’s something there.
My google scraper has come up with another small gem; my colleague Sam describing his co-curated exhibition “The Past from Above” which is well worth a trip to see. The artefacts in the gallery really set this show apart from a mere photography exhibition.
Since our joint 
