Has anyone managed to convert the OS Opendata ‘panorama’ .dxf files into usable UK contour maps? As far as I can see these are considerably more detailed than the SRTM DEM ‘roll your own’ contour models (albeit UK only), but are in a seriously tacky autocad format. The OS DEM model is more amenable to manipulation, but then you have to roll your own contours again, which seems daft when the OS DEM data is derived from the contours in the first place. I can smooth and interpolate and extrapolate lots and lots (I did) and also wind in spotheight data and heights from GPS tracks, but frankly the hand drawn OS contours are probably still the best (if you spot and fix the odd labelling errors - e… 240m contour lines labelled at 140m).
While on the OPENDATA topic, does anyone happen to have a pointer to just how much of this is already rolled up into the OSM maps for the UK? AFAICT OS road data is pretty useless, being cut everytime it goes under a bridge or whatever, but is looks like water, admin boundary, placenames, land cover etc is all good data … but maybe already included?
And thirdly (GSVs always come in 3s), is the ‘cROW’ access land polygon data already included? This (like OS vector data) is available in nice tractable ESRI format (although the access land boundary is rather a stinker, in that it contains about 5x more points than it needs to, wrapped up at just a few (10?) objects with thousands of components in each object.
p.s. I tried the talk_uK mailing list but it appears to be morbid, or at least moribund … I guess forums have won.