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OSNI GeoHub – nice viewer, shame that’s all

So if you can’t afford the vast expense or take the time to understand the complex licensing schemes how do you use high quality map data that we have already paid for?

Well if you live in England, Scotland or Wales the Ordnance Survey is starting to gradually open up its data silos with the OS OpenSpace API. However here in Northern Ireland we are still stuck behind the iron curtain. OSNI doesn’t supply its geodata to OpenSpace but a feint at openness was suggested with the map viewer that is GeoHubNI.

geohubni

It’s actually a fairly decent viewer compared to their previous attempt and allows the user to view both large and small scale map data.

Now this is all very well if all you want to do is view or print but that’s it, that’s all you can do here…no mashups or spatial analysis possible.

Right now there’s no way of combining external data with OSNI’s maps to build tools such as fixmystreet.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Irish Geodata, web maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “OSNI GeoHub – nice viewer, shame that’s all”

  1. Eamonn Doyle Says:
    December 19th, 2009 at 10:15 am

    Fair comment, it would be nice to see a more open GeoHubNI. However it’s a pilot Spatial Data Infrastructure platform, the design of which pre-dates much of what has happened since on the open geoweb.

    GeoHubNI supports mashup is 3rd Party layers with OSNI maps. It also supports very advanced spatial query, however these facilities are only available to certain classes of registered users.

  2. john mcclean Says:
    January 6th, 2010 at 4:11 pm

    But it’s not a decent viewer compared with anything else available online. It looks like a poor scan of a paper map, zooming to a black and white OS-style picture. Compare that to maps of the rest of the UK available on Mapquest or Bing where anybody can view a proper OS map with simple intuitive search drag and zoom capability, and GeohubNI looks a bit pathetic. Admittedly you can zoom right in to land registry detail to see individual houses etc. but the interface is very dated and difficult to use.

  3. OpenGeo Says:
    January 6th, 2010 at 4:34 pm

    @john The viewer is is basic but it is the only way to access OSNI maps online and that is my main problem that I have with it. Bing, Mapquest et al use navteq and teleatlas for Northern Irish mapping.

    @eamonn I’ve seen a demo of 3rd party layers overlaid and this does boost functionality but it is only for the few…

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