Last year, the Ordnance Survey (Britain's national mapping agency) announced that they were going to freely release much of their data for non-commercial applications. Although some people quickly assumed this would be everything, most of us were well aware that only some of the data would be 'free'. For example Mastermap was almost certainly going to continue to be a commercial-only product.

Details are finally beginning to emerge with the Ordnance Survey's publication, Policy Options for Geographic Information from Ordnance Survey - Consultation. As expected, the raster products that were already available through OpenSpace will be included in the initiative (they are already 'free', but their delivery & use will become more flexible). 1:25,000 colour raster and the "MiniScale" (1:1,000,000) raster products will also be added to the free raster range.

The free vector products will include Code-Point (full grid-referenced postcode data - previously announced), Boundary Line (1:10,000 boundary dataset - used by a lot of local governments),  Meridian 2 (transport network and topographic themes), and Strategi (1:250,000 scale topographic database).

The full document is available as a 91 page PDF document, here.

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