Well done OS, you’ve done it again

As mentioned on, Digital Urban and Londonist, to name but two blogs, as well as the usual suspect, the Guardian covering the story. The Ordnance Survey have again shown their rather blinkered approach to public responsibility in favour of commercialisation by stopping a UCL CASA project to show air pollution in London within Google Earth using 3D buildings.

Since the 3D buildings are produced in part from OS MasterMap data the project is now only able to be used within government departments, as they have licenses to use the datasets already. The point of the UCL’s project was to allow the public to have a view of the situation.

The Londonist article describes the OS as the bank manager character from the Nationwide adverts, constantly going against normal thinking with ‘it doesn’t work like that’ answers. Some may think this is a bit harsh, but personally I’d say it was apt for:

The UCL’s own user interface is still available on their project site, but I don’t know how long that will last, it is, however, very impressive.