Promap is bringing the Ordnance Survey’s large-scale maps to users through the internet, replacing a stack of CDs. Adam Tinworth reports
With the boom in digital mapping sources, the fact that the Ordnance Survey’s maps have been available electronically through Promap for years sometimes gets forgotten.
Promap, which hitherto has existed as a pile of 15 CDs covering data on all parts of the country, is being launched as an online service.
Promap uses the OS’s large-scale mapping, which gives detail right down to field boundaries and building shapes.
Users can print or export selected maps after finding them by address, postcode, national grid reference, land parcel number or OS map tile searches.
Once a user has opened an account over the telephone – online registration is coming – he or she will have access to all the functions of the CD version over the internet.
Anthony Wrigley, director of Prodat Systems, which is behind Promap, points out that there are several key benefits to the new system, including the facility to store maps you have already paid for on Prodat’s servers.
“It’s great for corporates who want to keep track of the maps they’ve already paid for,” says Wrigley.
Other online advantages include updated map information as soon as changes are available, rather than in occasional releases of amended CDs.
One problem that the firm has worked hard to minimise is the delays involved in dealing with data across the internet.
Wrigley claims, and demonstrates, that the company has designed the service so that it works acceptably over a dial-up modem.
Improved payment method
Along with the switch to the web comes a change in the payment method.
With the CD version of Promap, users are required to pay in advance, and once they have used up all their credit, they have to buy more before progressing more work with the system.
With Promap web, users are billed on a monthly basis and they can view their account online. Moreover, each use can be tagged to a particular job to make recharging to clients easier.
Companies with multiple users will soon be able to set up administrative accounts that can monitor the level of usage by each subscriber and, if necessary, curtail it.
The CD and web versions of the service will be running in parallel, for now, and developments in one will most likely appear in the other as well.
However, Wrigley emphasises that the web version of the service will be adding new sets of map data that will most likely never be available on the CD version.