Now I just need to generate some spare time to think through what’s possible with all this.

Also, intriguingly, the Ordnance Survey has released an API that mitigates my old post somewhat.

The Ordnance Survey, those charged with measuring the British Isles, seem to have a particularly backward view of the internet and the democratisation of content. For now, it’s really annoying. Genuinely white-hat projects are getting canned because the OS is stuck in the (relative) dark ages. Five years from now, it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Either they will have opened up, or they will have been supplanted as the primary open mapping service in the UK – if not over the whole UK then at least in London. In that time I expect Google to have photographed everything, and someone’s bound to come along and do something very clever with Photosynth to get high-accuracy metrics out of those images.

Even if it’s not Google that does it, the market pressure is high enough that someone is going to offer the service that the OS doesn’t want to, and it’s only going to get cheaper for them to do it as time goes on.