Importing Ordnance Survey Vectors

The OS Mastermap vectors are in a GML format. To read them into most GIS systems they need to be converted first. There is a script which will convert the vectors into ESRI Shapefiles - GML2Shape.sh. This uses the ogr2ogr utility which comes with GDAL.

---

Procedure

To convert the OS vectors, copy them off the DVD into a directory. Then run:

GML2Shape.sh <shapefilesdir> <gmlfilesdir>

where <shapefilesdir> is a directory path where you want the shape files to go to (they will overwrite any files with the same name - suggest you use an empty directory called shapefiles in the gmlfiles directory) and <gmlfilesdir> is the directory path where the GML vectors have been copied to.

Once converted, copy the original DVD contents and shapefiles over to the arsf/vectors/from_os/ directory, and create a symlink (named by project code) to the shapefile directory. Also make sure the vector request table on the wiki is updated and the licence expiry date noted.