MiniScale Overview

This overview introduces MiniScale, giving context for all users – highlighting key features, providing examples of uses, and listing details such as coverage, scale, etc.

Ordnance Survey’s MiniScale is a small-scale product designed for use within desktop graphic applications. It provides geographic context for the whole of Great Britain by showing major boundaries, lines of communication, settlements and physical features.

MiniScale is a vector graphic that has been created using desktop publishing software so that it can be customised and converted into a wide variety of graphic formats. Alternatively, the raster examples can also be used for web applications or within a geographical information system (GIS) as a backdrop.

MiniScale is aimed at any customer who requires a high-quality, visually appealing map for their documents and / or publications, whether that be a magazine, brochure or website.

An extract of MiniScale, with default layers and styles, is shown below.

An extract of MiniScale showing default layers and styles.

Applications

Typical ways in which MiniScale could be used include:

• Creating location maps for websites or promotional material, for example, showing the locations of head offices or the distribution of assets across Great Britain.

• Facilitating high-level route planning along major roads and railways.

• Producing overview or entry screen maps within an Intranet or Internet web mapping service.

The smaller scale of MiniScale also lends itself to applications that need to show information at a regional or county/unitary level, where a larger-scale map would be too detailed or cluttered.

Overview

Scale

1:1 000 000 (1mm = 1km); MiniScale is designed to be used at viewing scales of between 1:700 000 and 1:2 000 000.

Coverage

Great Britain.

Source of MiniScale

MiniScale is a generalised hand drawn map, with updates derived from the 1:250 000 scale topographical digital database.

Legend

The legend is available to download from the MiniScale Downloads page.

Currency

MiniScale is a hand-drawn map. This enables us to achieve the extreme simplification, generalisation and ‘look’ of MiniScale. The data is updated using the latest available version of Ordnance Survey’s 1:250 000 scale topographical digital database as a guide.

Revision

The MiniScale master dataset is updated and released annually in January.

Index

• Supply and formats

• Contextual or derived mapping products georeferencing guide

• Depiction of roads and towns

• Data compression

• Features, layers and styles