Now, as much as we love Google Maps, readers in the UK will know there’s only one serious map-maker when it comes to accurate, local, real-world data – the Ordnance Survey.
The famed UK map-maker recently open-sourced all of its staggeringly detailed maps of the UK, letting users take its data and do with it as they please – which is one of the greatest developments in the history of open data, as far as we’re concerned.
Now you can access Ordnance Survey maps on Android, for free, thanks to gvSIG Mini – a multiple-map viewer app with layer support.
And those are Ordnance Survey maps in action. Doesn’t look much and they haven’t used the clearest of images available, but it still provides significantly more local data than you get from Google Maps.
Loads more map types are supported by the app, including Open Street Map to the right there. Read more about gvSIG Mini over at the maker’s web site, or check out a video of it in action here.
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Peterdk
/ May 3, 2010Zooming in this app is very bad. It doesn’t first preload the images when you zoom, but displays a empty background and then loads the maptiles. Really frustrating compared to google maps.
Patrick
/ May 3, 2010At first it seemed a bit slow when not using WIFI but once cached maps is very very fast and without consuming connection. thnxx
adam g
/ May 3, 2010yes perhaps slower initially, but the beauty of this is the cached maps. downloading foreign maps from home before going on holiday, for instance. ordnance survey is great for the rural uk. wouldnt it be great if google maps allowed offline downloading of areas, for when for instance you plan to use navigation through an area of poor signal
joe h
/ February 1, 2011I think the choice of layer shown in the picture is far from the best. I think you should also show: WMSLayers:Ordanance Survey (UK) Open Space. These look just like traditional OS maps but seem to show a level of detail not available on the commmon (1:25000) OS maps. I live in a rural area and my house is shown individually.