Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iudqnolq | Hacker News Reader

This is tangentially related, but I want to call out the ordnance survey for making their data available. A large portion of their data is licensed under the UK's Open Government License.

The map tiles themselves aren't, but they recently moved from a "call one of our partners for a quote" model for licensing to an extremely cheap and friendly model. In "development mode" you get rate limited to about one request per second but it's free, in "production mode" their hiking maps are $0.000046 per tile with the first ~$1,400 per month free.

This made a hobby project of mine (an open source backpacking map for Android) feasible. I found it interesting that the previous situation seemed to be because they couldn't be bother/didn't have the resources to open up, not because they had a reason to want to keep things more restricted.

My only remaining complaint is the license doesn't allow you to cache for more than 24 hours. All commercial outdoors maps apps allow caching for longer because you might be out of cell service for a few weeks, and I wish I could offer this feature. I'd be totally fine if it cost more.

Edit: fyi, my number doesn't match their pricing page because I changed the unit to make more sense to someone not super familiar with maps and converted to USD.

> I want to call out the ordinance survey for making their data available

Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance". They're not interchangeable, even though they share a common origin.

Thanks! This is the first time I've written the word out, I always abbreviate it OS

Actually, you were correct [1], jfk13 is mistaken, but it was an easy mistake to make.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey

I corrected it in an edit. I originally spelled it Ordinance.

Ordnance literally means artillery; shells and bullets :)

Which is exactly how they got their name: the Ordnance Survey was the organisation responsible for generating accurate maps for the purposes of planning and executing artillery shoots.

That actually makes more sense than "Ordinance Survey" :)

It could be the national government's legally authoritative survey :)

To be precise, their original goal [0] was to map Scotland in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745, to to help the crown to subjugate the clans (as opposed to just lobbing arty fire at them).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey#Origins

I wouldn't give the organisation too much credit. It might be that they are modernising and friendlier now, but from memory, they were very much forced into the start of the process of opening up in the early 2000s. Before, it pretty much had a monopoly on the data which had been collected at the taxpayers expense, and was effectively run as a private company which, among other things, sold products using this data to taxpayers at a profit.

What's the name of your app? I have been looking for something like that. OS maps really are fantastic.

I made the questionable choice to write my map renderer from scratch, got it barely working, then got bored and abandoned the project at least for now. When I finish my current pet project I plan to replace it with an existing renderer and focus on the hiking/backpacking specific features I can add.

If you want something that actually works I highly recommend Gaia. They only have OS's driving maps built-in, but you should be able to manually add OS's leisure maps. Reasonable usage will definitely fit within OS's free tier, but you'll probably need to pay Gaia for pro. Disclaimer: I've worked with the tech this described a lot, but not actually done the steps I'm suggesting.

See:

https://osdatahub.os.uk/docs/wmts/overview

https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047068634-How-...

My WIP project: https://github.com/danielzfranklin/backpackingmap

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