… Ordnance Survey

I don’t know how actors do it.

Having to play emotional scenes where you cry-on-demand must be incredibly challenging. I don’t know anything that is soooo upsetting that it would squeeze real tears from my eyes just by thinking about it.

That is, until I started looking at Ordnance Survey Licensing Agreements.

(This is a screenshot of Ordnance Survey’s ‘open’ maps for public use. It’s a screenshot because there aren’t simple instructions to embed it in a free WordPress blog. What’s more, the ‘public use’ maps aren’t relevant to this post, and (still) don’t show the public toilets. But it Looks Pretty.)

This trauma began a month ago when, in my innocence, I tried emailing some more ‘open councils’ from the OpenlyLocal.com Scoreboard. These new councils had just published a few bits of spending-related data, but no school locations, no library locations, no ‘dataset of the location of the 120 000 lampposts in Lesser Hampton’, and certainly no toilets.

[Context: In order to make The Great British Public Toilet Map I'd like councils to publish information on where their toilets are as 'Open Data', meaning the type of file that anyone can download ('open') and that's compatible with computer-programming ('data').

To you and me it would look like this...

OpenData .csv file for (doomed) Manchester Public Toilets

...which might not look that exciting, but magical computer programs could join together all 300-odd local council datasets and display it on one map!

This would make it easier for people to find out where public toilets are (and if they're open and what facilities are provided) without having to check 300-odd council websites]

So, I asked these new ‘open’ councils if they’d considered publishing open data for public toilets and sent my email to the attention of their web/data enthusiast (who doesn’t have one of those?!)

In return I got lots of replies from very nice GIS managers explaining that this was not possible. Or, more to the point, not legal.

Eek.

But why?

… OpenStreetMap

In my endeavors to get open data on public toilets in existence for the benefit of, erm, everyone, I regularly consider the potential of OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap

For anyone who doesn’t know, (and for those that do, feel free to skip my ill-informed explanation..) OpenStreetMap is a map of the country that’s created by members of the public. This began because Ordinance Survey data (along with other maps like those used by Google and SatNavs) was private and expensive and couldn’t be enhanced (or in some cases corrected) by you or me.

They created it by walking around with their personal GPS systems, logging data and adding it to the online map. It struck me as remarkably geeky, not to mention slow progress. Yet when I learnt about it in 2007 due to my MA Industrial Design Engineering project (self-promotion), a skeleton map of Britain was emerging.

Now they seem to be using satellite images provided by Yahoo as well, meaning people no longer have to have a GPS and traipse the streets. Instead you can just go online, log-in, and trace, colour and label the satellite images, thus creating a map. Consequently a huge leap forward has been made in the last few years – it’s looking pretty complete and I’m starting to see it used on websites instead of Google Maps. I’m sure you have to, perhaps without realising it.

… and Public Toilets

One of the things that can be added to the map is a public toilet. The map above, centered on London Bridge, has a few examples (you can click on it then zoom in via the next window. I couldn’t get the map to embed directly). As I’m not remotely proficient in OpenStreetMap it’s hard for me to analyse the quality of this data. I’ve no doubt these toilets exist and are accurately located as that’s the entire ethos of the project.