I’ve only just spotted this one – perhaps the official release date of April 1st meant that it was overlooked with the usual rubbish April Fools stories that populate a lot of the online tech sites – but it would appear that Ordnance Survey has released a large and useful subset of their mapping data under a very open license. For more details, see the OpenStreetMap page here, or the Ordnance Survey page here.

What’s particularly good about this is not just that they’ve released their data, but they’ve also gone so far as to open up APIs for developers to use. This could be a huge boon for mapping sites – or indeed any website or application which would benefit from mapping information – and should help to fill a few holes and add some more metadata to the UK’s OpenStreetMap efforts.