Swedish maps are released – New Technology

     As of July 1, 2015 provides the Land Survey GSD overview map, vector, without license and with simplified terms of use. Photo: Land Survey
     

A fire engine or ambulance can not find the scene of the accident can make the injury worse. And if a wrong turn is due to poor maps, it is indefensible. Therefore wants Land Survey now make their maps available for all – free.

First released the so-called The overview map, a map scale of 1: 250,000 covering the whole country. It includes roads, buildings, boundaries, contours, hydrography and reference network. The overview map will be free on July 1st. At the same time releasing Land Survey simplified elevation model with 50 meters resolution and 2 meter accuracy in height.

At the turn released four more general maps:

1. Road Map, scale 1: 100,000 with comprehensive and timely reporting of roads.
2. terrain map at a scale of 1:50 000 with roads, paths and detailed descriptions of the various types of forest and land.
3. Fjällkartan scale of 1: 100,000 with timely and reliable information on mountain trails, bridges, huts and emergency telephones. Fjällkartan covers the mountain area from Salen in the south to the boundary mark in the north.
4. SWEPOS nationwide network services DGNSS for measuring and positioning with meter accuracy. The database can be used to build positioning applications for standard mobile phones.

– Our goal is to try to increase the use of geodata in society – both in the commercial and public sectors. It will be facilitated by making it free. Now hampered by the charge, says Peter Nyhlén, director of the National Land Survey maps sale, to new technologies.

He mentions the major forest fire in Bergslagen in the summer when the first fire engine had old maps and drove wrong – with devastating consequences.

– Right in the area we had put all new roads back in 2003, but the rescue had not updated its material, probably because it cost money, says Peter Nyhlén.

The information Land Survey now gradually opening makes available during the open data license Creative Commons. This means that information can be used, distributed, redone, modified and built upon in commercial contexts as long as the user indicates that it is the National Land Survey of the author.

– There is a seal that maps from the National Land Survey. It is only we who have the strength to gather information from an entire country. No one else has such detailed data regarding the Swedish countryside as we said Peter Nyhlén.

Land Survey released the news that the so called small-scale map data is free at the conference Position 2015 in Fairfield today Tuesday. It’s about geodata that today is partially contributory.

Eventually we hope the National Land Survey of all spatial data Land Survey has in its databases will be available free of charge, thus also data that today is completely contributory and costs substantially more to buy than the small-scale map information.

It is then on aerial imagery, high-resolution elevation data and addresses. But it requires a political decision and more money for Land Survey.

– For the full opening of geographic data and addresses needed an appropriation of approximately 100 million per year, which we called for in the budget proposal for 2016 to 2018, says the National Land Survey Director General Bengt Kjellson in a press release on Tuesday.

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