NPE Maps
From IdeasInTransit
NPE Maps (New Popular Edition Maps) aims to collect all the post codes of the UK under a public domain license.
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Product
NPE Maps makes scans of out-of-copyright 1950's Ordnance Survey maps of England, Scotland and Wales available on the internet as a base map for a range of purposes. Originally used within Free the Postcode NPE Maps are also made available for use by OpenStreetMap contributors using Potlatch and JOSM. These maps are useful for entering data about features that haven't changed in the past 50 years, such as most rural road, places, watercourses and peaks to compliment aerial photography or in places where there is no aerial photography.
History
The project originally started with just map bases for England and Wales and eventually expanded to include Scotland, however suitable out of copyright maps have still yet to be sourced for Northern Ireland.
The project first required that a complete set of 1950's 1" to mile maps were collected, then scanned and processed into tiles suitable for use by the site.
NPE Maps also work in connection with Free the Postcode, a project creating a more accurate collection of UK postcodes using GPS locations.
During 2008 NPE Maps were made avaiable through Potlatch.
Future development
NPE Maps is currently searching for out of copyright maps of Northern Ireland for which to incorporate into the project. They currently cannot provide a service for Northern Ireland as the Ordinance Survey did not produce there an equivalent map to the New Popular Edition used for the rest of the country.
