Open Source GIS – Effective Ways to Load OS VectorMap Data

Question

Us lucky fellows in the UK have been able to access public geodata from Ordance Survey under an open licence since April this year. Some of the datasets, including VectorMap, are broken into 100 files per grid square, each containing multiple layers, in this case in shape format. To cover the wider London area with VM you need to load 400 x 12 or so layers, with each layer identically named. Any tips on the best ways to do this, preferably using free or open source tools?

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/opendata/

Answer 1

As a first step, if you want to merge multiple shapefiles into a single shapefile (to ease loading in whatever viewer you choose), you can use OGR utilities to merge shapefiles within a directory or multiple directories. If you're interested in experimenting with GeoScript, you can also do the same thing in JavaScript (or Python, Groovy, or Scala).