Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

While penning yesterday's missive regarding the forthcoming availability of OSi mapping data from Mapyx, I had little idea of what was in the pipeline from Anquet. Until now, Anquet's established offering in the digital mapping arena was restricted to areas on Great Britain. Unless I missed something, not even Northern Ireland got a look in while Scotland's islands and even the Isle of Man were very well covered. However, an email from them this morning suggests that will be changing.

Apparently, Anquet is also planning to make OSi 1:50000 digital mapping available as part of a move to include more countries in its portfolio. Quite what is driving this expansion is open to question but it is an exciting development whether they are moving into new territorial markets or they are banking on British outdoors lovers fancying a spot of overseas explorations who would like the planning of such escapades to be easier. Whatever the reasoning, they seem to be starting with Éire so let's hope that Northern Ireland isn't forgotten in the rush.

Seeing two mainstays of the British digital mapping market featuring Irish data has to make you wonder what other players like Memory Map or Tracklogs have in hand. After all, if this is due to a push on the part of the OSi, there may be more to come. Thinking about it now, having Mapyx and Anquet selling OSi 1:50000 Discovery data does follow on from its availability on Geolives since the start of the year. That development may have signalled a break from digital mapping being provided on a country by country basis and that's no bad thing at all. In fact, things have got a bit more exciting now that it has happened, an unthinkable occurrence in times when paper maps were all that we had.