Digimap is an online mapping service for UK Higher and Further Education. It allows staff and students at subscribing institutions to access maps from Ordnance Survey, and British Geological Survey, as well as some marine mapping products from Sea Zone, and some historic mapping from Landmark Solutions.
The service allows the students to access not only the online maps, but also to annotate them, print them out and then to download the raw data which gives a lot more power for researchers.
Services like Google Maps and the ones from Microsoft have really sort of brought mapping services to the fore recently, but the problem with those services is they’re great for what they’re designed for – maybe looking up the location of a shop, or finding directions to the pub – but they really do lack the amount of detail that’s available from mapping providers like Ordnance Survey. So, with the Digimap service you’re getting these much higher detailed maps.
Another key advantage of the Digimap service is the high-quality printing that you can do. The service allows you to print A3 or A4 maps as high-quality PDF prints, so these are much higher quality than the printing direct from your browser that you do in Google Maps.
We’ve also recently enabled our users to be able to annotate these PDF maps – putting on their own markers, texts, polygons and that sort of information. Users can now annotate these maps, adding in their own cartographic features, and still print these out on the PDF-quality maps.
The other key advantage of Digimap over these online services is that you can download the raw data itself, and this enables you to go on and use this in a GIS or CAD software package; and this is where the real power of the services comes in, for users to be able to do research with the data.
There are lots of help pages and YouTube videos on how to use all aspects of the service. We also provide email and telephone support for all our users’ mapping needs – so there’s a wealth of information that we make available. There’s also a blog and a Facebook page to keep people up-to-date with what’s going on with the Digimap service too.
The desire for high levels of detail in mapping can be seen from the numbers around Digimap. There are up to fifty thousand users at any point in the year of the service, and they come from a hundred and fifty different institutions, and over three thousand departments within those institutions. This is a service that is used extensively by a wide variety of academics, and over the years, since its inception, Digimap has really been the backbone of a huge amount of research that couldn’t have been done without such exposure to the detailed mapping.
The service is free at the point of use, so any student, researcher, or staff member can have access to the data straight away – there’s no lengthy procurement process to go through that might be the case if they were buying the data direct from the supplier.
As the government is supporting the service, it is important that there are impacts not only for academia, but also to the wider community; so as the service is so widely used in all aspects of academia, it’s inevitable that some of these benefits have spilled over and will affect everyone in the UK.
Digimap is being used to train paramedics and other emergency services on where to position their vehicles at major incidents; also in the field of medicine, research into predicting demand for hospital use has benefitted from Digimap data.
Crime mapping is another area where the skills learnt using Digimap data have gone on to help shape government policy and policing strategies, so it isn’t just the obvious areas of geography or civil engineering, town planning that benefit from Digimap data.
So, in all areas of study, Digimap allows the use of real-life scenarios and access to real-world data, and this better equips students for when they go out into the world of work, and they have the right kind of knowledge and skills to predict floods more accurately, dig archaeological sites more efficiently – the list goes on.