This week from Monday through to Sunday you’ll find us at the Digital Shoreditch festival, an event that attracts hundreds of speakers from the most innovative and successful companies and organisations across creative, technical, start-up tech and digital spaces and beyond. During the week, we’ll be exhibiting, speaking and promoting our digital products and services amongst some of Tech City’s most talented digital and technical creative individuals.
The festival has a different theme each day, comprising of panel sessions, key note speeches and discussions – kicking off with Monday’s “What Tech City” theme. During the day, festival goers collectively explored the many companies and organisations that make Tech City what it is, focusing on developing new ways to exploit the potential for growing global engagement and improving our digital economy and society.
Continue reading 'Digital Shoreditch festival 2013 – hear how we’re involved!'»
Developer Engagement Events, Events, GeoVation Team, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
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GeoVation, innovation, innovation funding, Ordnance Survey, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace
Wales Coast Path GeoVation Challenge winners, Helen and Nicola Steer, have just launched their new iPhone app, Real 
Food Wales, which will help visitors to the area discover local, sustainable and delicious food.
Last year’s GeoVation Challenge called for innovative ideas using geography and technology which would help connect communities and visitors along the Wales Coast Path, benefiting those who live and work along the route, and beyond and Real Food Wales was one of the 5 ideas we funded. They were awarded a £30,000 of innovation funding to develop their idea. They are part of Mapkin: a team of five people who have worked together to develop this app.
Real Food Wales is an easy to use app, which maps over 150 of the best food businesses in Pembrokeshire, helping users access sustainable and delicious food.
Helen from Real Food Wales, said: “Real Food Wales is an ideal app for anyone looking for a special meal at a restaurant, a bite to eat in a quirky café, the best sausage in town for your campfire or a food experience you’ll never forget. The app utilises our unique network of local knowledge by displaying a large selection of food businesses on an offline interactive map of Pembrokeshire. The map really highlights what an exceptional range of local food businesses are operating in this area.”
The core feature of Real Food Wales is the interactive map, consisting of five zoom levels, which allow users to find the best places to eat out, buy food or have a foodie experience. A unique feature of the app is that it stores an offline map of Pembrokeshire onto the device, meaning that users can still access all of the information even when there is no mobile signal.
Continue reading 'GeoVation winner launches Real Food Wales app'»
Our GeoVation judging panel met this week and were delig
hted at the quality and scope of the ideas submitted to our GeoVation Challenge to look for ways that British business could improve their environmental performance using Ordnance Survey products or services in the solution.
The judging panel have now selected a short-list of 10 finalists who have been invited to develop their ideas further at GeoVation Camp, held over the weekend of 21 -23 June 2013 at Ordnance Survey in Southampton.
The finalists who have been invited to GeoVation Camp are:
- “Virtual” national transport fleet. An idea to create a connect-able, broker-free web of independent transport companies; breaking down the systemic big company / small company inefficiencies which exist.
- Creating an Energy Democracy: The Wasted Energy Network – This was the top voted idea on the GeoVation Challenge. The idea a platform for encouraging inter-business recycling, triggering waste based economies and identifying areas of opportunity for sustainable waste management and energy generation systems.
- RecycleLink The idea is to bring waste producers and processors together using a centralised trading platform that will facilitate collaboration and therefore reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill.
Challenge 2012-13, Environment Challenge
| best ideas, environment, finalists, GeoVation, GeoVation camp, geovation challenge, innovation, innovation funding, judging panel, Ordnance Survey
With only a few hours left to enter the GeoVation Challenge to help business save the environment, I thought it would be good to see where, in the UK, the ideas that have been submitted are from. Take a look at our OS OpenSpace map below and you can use the links within the markers to find out more about the ideas and comment and vote on them.
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If you’ve got an idea to help British business be greener then it’s not too late to enter your own ideas too . You have until 12 noon today (1 May) to enter the GeoVation Challenge. We are looking for ideas that use Ordnance Survey data, including OS OpenData and OS OpenSpace, together with other open data. The best ideas will be invited to a weekend GeoVation Camp from 21 – 23 June 2013 where you can work on building your idea into a prototype and pitch to the judging panel. Successful ideas receive a share of £100,000 funding to get started on developing their ideas.
In a previous blog, we shared news about how we were supporting the BlueLightCamp hackathon, which was a developer event that took place in Manchester last Sunday. Aimed at developers that work in the Fire, Police and resilience services in the public and private sector, the event provided an opportunity for participants to explore and develop prototype ideas that address just some of the criminal and justice issues we face today.
The day kicked off at 10 am, with the event organisers providing a recap of some of the key topics that had been discussed in Saturday’s unconference. One recurring theme related to the increasing role that social media is playing in the provision of such services and the potential that these channels of communication may hold for the future. Many examples were cited of how police forces are increasingly using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with the public. It was highlighted that some forces are even adopting other platforms such as Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and Flickr to not only to broadcast information, but to engage with people directly and to open lines of communication that were previously not in place.
Continue reading 'Developers gather at BlueLight Camp 2013 hackathon'»
You may have missed it, so we thought it was timely to remind all our GeoVator’s that Ordnance Survey recently refreshed the portfolio of products that are freely available through the OS OpenData portal. Releasing both a new height dataset, as well as making significant updates to one of the backdrop mapping products, here are just a few key points that might whet your appetite.
The portal has been updated with a new version of OS VectorMap District and a new product – OS Terrain 50® being released, we’ll cover the height dataset first.
The image illustrates OS Terrain 50 data overlaid on backdrop mapping
OS Terrain 50®
Developers can also now access a new fully maintained analytical height product called OS Terrain 50. The new product, which has a similar resolution to Land-Form PANORAMA, will enable users to access an advanced product with consistently maintained height content for the whole of Great Britain.
Continue reading 'New products available through OS OpenData portal'»
Time is running out to submit your ideas to our latest GeoVation Challenge. We’re offering a slice of £100,000 in funding for the best ideas which use geographic data to help business improve their environmental performance and I’ve been finding examples to help to get you thinking.
When Ordnance Survey moved offices in January 2011, we down-sized from a building designed to accommodate more than 3,500 people to our new location which was built for around 1,000. This meant we had a lot of excess furniture which we wanted to ensure was disposed of in an environmentally friendly way. The excess furniture included racking and shelves, desk screens, filing cabinets, cupboards, desks, desk chairs, meeting chairs, plan chests, pedestals, soft seating, plants and much more.
We used a company called GoGreen to help us manage disposal of the furniture. GoGreen provides an end-to-end sustainable proposition with a zero-to-landfill guarantee which, for unwanted surplus items, includes donation to UK charitable and other third sector beneficiaries. They processed some 17 895 items amounting to 484.6 tonnes – and nothing went to landfill.
Continue reading 'Go Green – and reduce our environmental impact'»
On the weekend of 27/28 April, we’re supporting BlueLightCamp, which is a free event being billed as both an unconference and hackathon. Attracting workers from across the blue light services i.e. Fire, Police and resilience services, the aim is to innovate through promoting good-practice sharing, exchanging knowledge, networking as well as providing an opportunity for concepts and solutions to be tested through the hackathon.
Through two mapping agreements that we have with the Public Sector, Ordnance Survey already works closely with many of the blue light services, providing: digital map products; the sharing and visualisation of data; supporting better problem solving and helping to reduce costs and drive up efficiency levels amongst other aspects. So it seemed entirely fitting to support the BlueLightCamp as we have a further opportunity to engage with and support the very individuals that work in these services.
Continue reading 'Unconference and hackathon weekend – come and innovate at BlueLightCamp'»
Events, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace, Uncategorized
| communities, funding, GeoVation, geovation challenge, innovation, Open Data Master Class, OS OpenData, OS OpenSpace
Over the last couple of years Ordnance Survey has been working on a collaborative project with UK Location Programme and Cabinet Office to implement map-based tools, making it easier for users to search and preview public location datasets available on data.gov.uk. The project was completed to further enable the publication of location datasets in support of the UK Location Strategy, and as part of the UK contribution to the European INSPIRE project.
We are now pleased to announce that the code developed by Ordnance Survey for these mapping tools has been released as open source.
The Map Based Search (see image below) allows users to draw a box on a background map, leading to a search for datasets which are wholly or partially contained in that area. It also features a gazetteer, so the user can locate by place name where on the map they want to draw their search box. This provide a richer, more advanced way of searching, at national, regional and local level, for records of data sets and services that are referenced by geographical coordinates.
Continue reading 'Code used to build map-based search tool released as open source'»
We’ve just sent out our spring issue of OS Innovation packed with lots of exciting news for the GeoVation and developer community. The newsletter is also available online.
Find our more about:
Also, you can find out about the OS OpenData competition which you still have time to enter, the new lifecycle of OS OpenSpace and take a look at the recently published GeoVation book!
If you would like the newsletter emailed to you in future please contact us and we’ll add you to the list.
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