Ordnance Survey announces Faster route to information and promotion

Ordnance Survey announces Faster route to information and promotion

Ordnance Survey maps are playing a growing role on the world wide web, bringing benefits to thousands of consumers of all kinds.

From their home and office desk tops, browsers can click onto a range of innovative web sites to pinpoint the nearest supermarket, curry house or cinema, and plan the best way to get there.

And with access to the Internet becoming more available on mobile phones and palmtops, people on the move are map reading on-screen too.

With a search engine such as StreetMap (www.streetmap.co.uk ), browsers can call up and zoom in on a site-centred map. They can use a range of search criteria such as place name, post and telephone code, and grid reference. By clicking on particular points, browsers can even open up email links. The service includes Ordnance Survey's popular Landranger mapping data, and goes on to show street level detail. m/f…

Ordnance Survey's ADDRESS-POINT dataset and 1: 50 000 Scale Gazetteer are key elements for the online local information provider UpMyStreet (www.upmystreet.com ). Users can find the distance, in yards or miles, to facilities such as their nearest chemist, adult education centre, or 24-hour petrol station. They can also check local population statistics, crime trends and a host of other public information referenced through postcoded data.

More and more businesses are customizing maps for their own web sites to showcase the location of shops, offices and branches. Online providers, many of them partners of Ordnance Survey, offer mapping as a useful tool for promotion and information. It improves the visual impact of sites, making them more fun, more interactive and more informative.

EasyMap (www.easymap.co.uk ) is a service popular with businesses and public alike. It has pioneered the use of vector mapping on the web with Macromedia Flash graphics software. EasyMap offers site owners the opportunity to customise the maps by adding, for example, extra symbols and icons. This allows browsers to choose only the information they want and dispense with the rest. Once they've found their desired pub, for example, they can select a specific mapped theme such as surrounding bus routes, cash machines or car parks. Pop-up boxes mean the cursor can be moved around with features flashing on and off, leaving the screen uncluttered and easy to read. EasyMap's clients can brand the map window to reflect their company logo or that of a sponsor, and can choose the size and scale of the map and where it appears on their site.

multimap.com (www.multimap.com ) offers web-based mapping to clients such as top retailers, estate agents, and car rental firms. Its In-line service delivers maps at any scale directly to organisations' web pages with optional zoom facilities. A Portal service allows clients to fully customise the look and feel of their map pages. Businesses with multiple outlets such as stores, restaurants and hotels can use multimap.com's new Store Finder service, which is also available on WAP phones. Users on the move can view a list of the branches in a particular area and directions on how to get there. Those with large-screen phones can then view maps showing the quickest route. multimap.com also provides aerial photographs which can be incorporated directly into web pages with scales down to 1: 1 000. Other features include travel directions and local weather forecasts. m/f…

eMapSite.com's interactive portal - www.eMapSite.com - gives commercial map users and web site owners a dedicated pathway to the latest Ordnance Survey mapping held on a central server. Instead of having to store large amounts of data, commercial map users can simply access it using a secure URL code, while hosting services are provided for web site owners. eMapSite.com is the first portal of its kind to offer small-scale Ordnance Survey raster map images, together with large-scale raster map images from other publishers, in real time using Image Web Server technology. It also combines Ordnance Survey height data and Landranger mapping to make 3-D images. Views can even be synchronised with aerial photography of the same area.

The Get-a-map service on Ordnance Survey's own web site - www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk - allows browsers to view and print out free mapping of Britain at a variety of scales. Users developing their own personal or business web sites can copy up to ten extracts for use online, again free of charge. It's also possible to view historical maps from the 19th century. Elsewhere on the site, there's a free service which opens up a window on what is shown on any of Ordnance Survey's 229,000 Land-Line® digital maps. This data, the most detailed digital mapping that exists of Britain, is updated every night.

Supporting map services on the web is a key part of Ordnance Survey's drive to maximise the benefits to Britain of its vast store of geographic information. "As we go further into the era of e-commerce, we expect this role to grow considerably," says Vanessa Lawrence, Ordnance Survey's Director General and Chief Executive. "Together with our partners, we are determined to remain the first choice for location-based data in the new information economy."