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I am trying to do a research project on changes in Land Cover in a London borough over time. I have access to OS MasterMap data through Digimap (the service that provides this data to universities in the UK), but I can't see a way to download a time series of data directly.

I've noticed that the tables that are produced from the OS MasterMap data have a couple of fields that give the date the feature was changed, and whether the feature was New or Updated at that point. However, I can't see a way to use this data to produce previous versions of the map data. Is this possible to do? It would seem strange for them to include these fields if there was no way to process the data to make them useful, but I can't see anywhere that they say (for example) what was there beforehand, if this feature is new.

I have heard that the British Library have snapshots of OS MasterMap data from various times, but these are only available as images, not as GIS data.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I could obtain a time series?

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Mastermap only goes back 8 years - before that you would need OS Landline datasets - unfortunately there is no link with FeatureID (Landline) and TOID in MasterMap. The same goes with OSCAR (roads old dataset) and ITN. Was a huge change in mapping detail between old and new products too. – Mapperz♦ May 6 '11 at 14:12
You may be better using the raster products (such as the 10k). They are updated regularly and may actually be easier to analyse than MasterMap for such a large area. – Matthew Snape May 6 '11 at 14:15
@Matthew - Thanks. Do you know if there are time series of these raster products available easily? – robintw May 6 '11 at 14:20
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If can find all the 10k rasters for each updated (6-9 month cycle) only an animated image with transparency will show change.Still will be a large amount of data for London (based on supplied Tiff format) – Mapperz♦ May 6 '11 at 14:23

2 Answers

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I found this on the Ordnance Survey Blog Map data video from 2004 to 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lvmcYvcJY2I

source: http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/04/3974/

(try contacting the author of the blog.)

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up vote 2 down vote

You don't mention the time period you are interested in but if it is long term then you might find the resources at http://visionofbritain.org.uk useful. They have raster scans of OS 1st and New Popular series maps.

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