Data Sources
GeoNames
GeoNames is an open data source of 10 million geographical names, with associated latitude-longitude coordinates and feature types.
We pick up daily updates from GeoNames and add them to the Unlock Places search.
Data is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
Ordnance Survey Open Data
Ordnance Survey Open Data has been available from the UK's national mapping agency since April 2010.
You are free to use the data for any purpose and should keep an attribution to Ordnance Survey.
Unlock searches through these datasets:
- Boundary-Line (detailed footprints for administrative areas)
- 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer (points identifying place-names extracted from maps)
- Meridian2 (generalised shapes)
- Code-Point Open (point locations of UK postal codes)
Natural Earth Data
Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales.
Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.
Other data sources?
We are in principle prepared to add any gazetteer data source for which we can illustrate a couple of use cases.
We have thought about adding OpenStreetmap data to Unlock but the job of searching OSM is being done well by Nominatim and LinkedGeoData.org is doing a lovely linked data OSM.
Ideally data should be published using an open license. We could also provide data search restricted to academic members of the UK Federation. Please get in touch about new data or features.
