The data.gov.uk website now contains over 9,000 datasets made freely available by central and local government and other public bodies. Over 1,000 of these datasets are location-based and contain metadata that define their geographic extents. A map search facility recently added to the data.gov.uk website now allows users to discover and preview these datasets through a map-based interface. 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.
The UK Location Map Based Search tools have been developed by the Ordnance Survey and data.gov.uk in partnership with the UK Location programme. Users can draw a rectangle to define their area of interest and then discover location-based datasets that are contained or intersect with the search area.
Many of these datasets can then be previewed individually or in groups on a preview map before downloading for own use or for consumption in a web-based map service.
The code used on the data.gov.uk site has now been released by Ordnance Survey as open source. It is mostly written in Javascript, and uses OpenLayers. It is integrated into the CKAN extension ‘ckanext-os’, available here and offered for reuse under the new BSD license.
