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- Sep 23, 2007
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I'm sure there are many reasons why people would want to outline county, unitary authority and town boundaries on a Google map. I did myself for The Skateparks Project. However, I could not find relevant .kml files anywhere. The odd county, sure, but not every county in the country formatted exactly as I required.
Therefore, I recently wrote a script that takes the county boundary coordinates from Ordinance Survey / data.gov.uk and reformats them into individual compressed .kml (.kmz) files. The original coordinates come in a file about 150mb, with coordinate accuracy to 1nm. Since Google maps displays kml overlays to 1m accuracy, there was a lot of cope for compression. Each county file is now around 30-100kb (see www.skateparks.co.uk/london as an example).
My question is, do you think there is a demand for a site that offers these files for, say, £2-3 per county or £50 for the whole of the UK? Note the original coordinates were obtained under government license which allows for manipulation and commercial use, resale etc...
I wondered if anyone on here ever had a need for them?
The script took about 30 hours to write in its entirety so not a simple nor practical task for the average commercial user to just come up with an alternative themselves.
I was thinking I'd offer county .kml files to 1nm accuracy for free (i.e. the coordinates available from data.gov.uk, albeit split into counties rather than one large file), then charge for the customised, minified, compressed version that would be created on the fly based on the user customising it using a form (i.e. colours, line weights etc).
Thoughts appreciated. Cheers, Alex.
Therefore, I recently wrote a script that takes the county boundary coordinates from Ordinance Survey / data.gov.uk and reformats them into individual compressed .kml (.kmz) files. The original coordinates come in a file about 150mb, with coordinate accuracy to 1nm. Since Google maps displays kml overlays to 1m accuracy, there was a lot of cope for compression. Each county file is now around 30-100kb (see www.skateparks.co.uk/london as an example).
My question is, do you think there is a demand for a site that offers these files for, say, £2-3 per county or £50 for the whole of the UK? Note the original coordinates were obtained under government license which allows for manipulation and commercial use, resale etc...
I wondered if anyone on here ever had a need for them?
The script took about 30 hours to write in its entirety so not a simple nor practical task for the average commercial user to just come up with an alternative themselves.
I was thinking I'd offer county .kml files to 1nm accuracy for free (i.e. the coordinates available from data.gov.uk, albeit split into counties rather than one large file), then charge for the customised, minified, compressed version that would be created on the fly based on the user customising it using a form (i.e. colours, line weights etc).
Thoughts appreciated. Cheers, Alex.
