Wait until you see the washed-out, badly-rendered OS VectorMap District rasters (now available for download). These really have been crippled to make them unusable by anyone with an eye for a map. They have no detail, appalling labelling and absurdly over-heavy grid lines. Shameless, shameless.

Hope this helps.

The encouragement of participation in healthy outdoor pursuits such as walking is a stated national aim and the freeing of core data on rights-of-way would have been of great help in furthering this aim.

My personal view is the Survey have done what they consider to be the very minimum necessary to get the free-our-data campaigners off their backs. The whole package is highly disappointing and the failure to include anything on rights-of-way is little short of disgraceful.

With my archaeologist hat on I’d really like to see the historic mapping (prior to the New Popular Edition) made available, even just as a web service.

We are apparently condemned to a location toolset linked to postcodes for the foreseeable future. This was great when we had no alternative method to pinpoint an address, or a point of interest, but really doesn’t cut the mustard now that all features are geocoded, and data such as addresses has been linked to an accurate position. Now we are in the twenty first century, we ought to see the post code for what it really is – a blind alley.

The Post Office were doing something very progressive when they introduced postcodes, but the release of Codepoint under the new OS regime is very much a half measure. The centre of a postcode doesn’t give precise enough data to make satnav and other location processes fit for purpose in so many applications that we now should be developing. Other countries will leapfrog our methods even if they never adopted post/zip coding techniques.

Presumably the reason for the cop out was – at least in part – financial. Gazetteers such as NLPG or Address Point were just too expensive to take the hit on the lost royalties to OS and RM that would have been necessary. But the strategic loss from poor location capability across UK plc will, even in the medium term, quickly outstrip the savings.

So we still need to keep up the campaign – free data is what is needed to escape from the cul de sac the current location mechanisms have got us into.

Also I personally see it as a sad backwards step that a lot of data is only being made available as shapefiles, but I guess you get what you pay for.