Politics and Cartography Collide: Mapping the Changing Landscape of Ordnance Survey

Abstract

<title/>For a number of years, debates on the way in which Ordnance Survey operates and the terms of its data use and reuse policies have been hotly contested. On one side, advocates of a free data policy have been vocal in their criticism of the current model and claim significant additional social and economic value would be generated from free map data. On the other, Ordnance Survey has had to defend such criticism due to the requirement for cost-recovery its status as a Trading Fund demands. At the International Cartographic Conference in Santiago, Chile during November 2009 we witnessed a dramatic and unexpected shift in the status of Great Britain’s national mapping agency. An announcement made by Prime Minister Gordon Brown the day before the planned keynote address by Vanessa Lawrence CB, Chief Executive Officer and Director General of Ordnance Survey, changed the mapping landscape and has significant ramifications. This article chronicles the events in Santiago and explores some of the reaction and possible implications to the freeing up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 as part of the Prime Minister’s Smarter Government initiative.