Basemap have years of experience in retailing leading digital mapping data.  The partnership with Ordnance Survey ensure that Basemap are up to date with all new data developments in Great Britain and are able to integrate these with different software solutions.  The digital data can be split into five sections:-

1) Digital Polyline Data

This data is designed to be used for travel planning, and consists of a continuous polyline representing a road network, walking paths or coming soon a cycle network.  There are different levels of detail available with this data, from premium products like the ITN datasets, down to the lesser detail available with Meridian 2.  This data comes usually as a GIS Shape/TAB file or as GML data and needs some GI software to view.

2) Raster Background Tiles

This data is effectively a digital version of a map, it's mainly used to provide a backdrop of an area, and this data varies in quality from the free 1:250 K data (250km tiles) down to the detailed level of 1:10 k and Mastermap Imagery.  The data itself is usually a TIFF or JPEG file which is geo-referenced using a world file - this tells a GI system where it needs to be placed on the map window.  Unlike the other datasets the original files can be loaded into most software products as an image.

3) Point Data

Point data is used to show a location based piece of information, this can be a point showing house locations, centre of post codes or can be information relating to the location of fire stations, schools or other points of information.  This data can come in a variety of forms, from an excel sheet containing postcodes through to GIS files.

4) Area Data

Area data is used to show a boundary - for example the boundary of a postcode region, or the boundary of a town.  This data can also be used when showing isochrones/contours, for example an hour's public transport travel time isochrone would be area data.  Area data will always come as a GIS file format - usually a TAB or SHAPE file.  

5) Public Transport Data

The final data type is public transport data; this is now freely available to all as part of the open data initiative.  There are various types of public transport data, NAPTAN data is a list of all the stops, this data comes in either CSV or XML file formats.  The timetabled data comes in three formats, ATCO CIF (text file), TransXchange (XML) and Google Transit Feed Specification (text files).  Basemap are experts with all these data types, you may want to use our consultancy service to tailor the data for your needs.