Automated cartography in the Ordnance Survey

Abstract

WHEN THE PROBLEMS and possibilities of automation first started to be discussed seriously amongst cartographers, the thinking in the Ordnance Survey was largely concerned with the problems of deriving small scale maps by computer generalisation from large scale maps that had been digitised, Superficially, this is a most attractive proposition and specially so when it is remembered that the equipment and techniques available at the time did not permit an acceptable standard of automatic drawing at the original scale; but in fact, the more it is considered the less attractive it may appear to become. Probably the main reasons for this are first that, in so far as I am aware, there is no country in the world, not even Britain, which is covered completely by large scale mapping and has no small scale mapping. Indeed, the reverse is almost always the case. Thus if one is considering the economies of such a method it is certainly only fair to credit the automated method with the cost of the revision of the small scales maps and not with the cost of their initial production. Even then practical problems of an organisational nature arise. In an ideal world, it would undoubtedly be true that topographic revision was always carried out on the largest scale map that a survey department published and from this revision the smaller derived scales of mapping would be subsequently revised. In practice, this is difficult for very good reasons, perhaps the best of which is that there are 7,200 component maps at our largest scale of 1–1250 in a typical single map at the scale of one inch to one mile. the task of getting all of these components corrected up‐to‐date simultaneously would be a formidable one, scarcely justified by the relatively small number of lines from the component large scale maps that finally appear on the small scale one; most of them being omitted because of generalisation.

Citation

GARDINER‐HILL, R. (1972), "Automated cartography in the Ordnance Survey", New Library World, Vol. 73 No. 11, pp. 297-299. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb038077