WRITTEN ON July 16th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Online Maps

Three months ago Stef* was freaking out about the Google maps explosion, we saw the Chicago crime map and Tom F came up with the idea we should run an Ideal Government competition to see who could hack what using public sector data and Google maps.

I’d just written up the rubric when we heard Google issued a “cease and desist” notice on a map hacker. Then the whole ID card nonsense erupted and we were drenched in lies, damned lies, the excellent dancing dog, and discussion about LSE’s sane and technically robust piece of work.

Anyway, now Google now says anyone can use the Google maps API for free services for now, so the Ideal Gov competition is back on, and it’ll run for the whole silly season ie until end Aug.

I wondered as a prize whether to get some old-style Ordnance Survey maps, before they became obsolete. That got me wondering what the Ordnance Survey made of this shoal of Googling pirhanafish swarming through its waters. I know their role in how on-line mapping emerges has been controversial for years, because as an agency and trading fund they’ve got a business to run and publicly funded mapping data is their key asset.

So I wrote to Vanessa Lawrence, OS chief exec, and got a nice reply with a day or so, and she agreed to provide five OS Select maps as prizes. So I hope we get some entries! I can’t do them myself, not knowing my API from my elbow.

The OS thinks the whole Google web-services deveopment is great, she says, as it will help to grow the market in geographic information.

Enabling user access to web mapping functionality via an API is the latest innovation of the growth in web mapping. The true innovation here is the ability to add value and that will certainly help to foster the developer network around mapping.

Well, yes indeed.

With regard to people using an Ordnance Survey map interface, you can of course download and print free extracts of Ordnance Survey mapping from our Get-a-map service – www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/getamap – but we are very clear that our key focus is the provision of data and not applications. We collect, maintain and supply the underpinning geographic reference framework for a wide range of map-based search engines and imaginative solutions developing in the marketplace.

She then points out a number of services available via their partner channel, which I’ve listed in the blogroll. I tried Get-a-map – it seems to work just fine.

Anyway, the intervening weeks have seen massive upsurge in Google-maps-based activity – see this lot, for example. Let’s try to make sense of it all, see what questions it begs, and ask them.*incidentally Stef has a small category called “Friends” on his blog, but he puts me in one called “Archive”. Man, the web can be harsh.