OS surveyors are not Tweeting about their work

OS surveyors are not Tweeting about their work

Surveyors from Britain’s national mapping agency are putting themselves on the map, with the help of microblogging network Twitter.

From today, Ordnance Survey staff will be Tweeting about their work and plotting it on an online map.

OS makes 5,000 changes each day to its national master map, with 300 surveyors working from the remotest parts of the Highlands to inner-city London. Not only are the data used for compiling up-to-date maps for outdoors enthusiasts, but by official bodies, individuals and companies to plan anything from planning bus routes to fraud detection, emergency service response and the digital TV switchover.

Surveyors on the ground use GPS satellite technology, accurate to just a few centimetres, to log changes, from the latest developments at the Olympic Park to the visitor centre on the summit of Snowdon. This, along with an aerial photography programme, enables significant changes to be ‘on the map’ within six weeks of them appearing.

All Ordnance Survey’s new Tweeters can be followed as usual by Twitter users, but their location-enabled Tweets can also be viewed on an interactive map built using the mapping agency’s web mapping API, OS OpenSpace.

The map allows users to easily see where each person is working and gives their location to within a few tens of metres.

The Ordnance Survey Twitter map can be seen on the Ordnance Survey website, along with individual surveyors’ usernames.

  • grough is a commercial partner of Ordnance Survey in its grough route mapping and route-planning system.

Some articles the site thinks might be related:

  1. No change for walkers’ maps as OS frees data
  2. Lake District walker rescued after injuring herself on Blencathra