OSGB-lat/long web service for GIS

We have loads of geographical information. Trouble is, it's almost all in OSGB grid reference form, which is no good for feeding to apps like Google Maps. Worse, much of it uses old-style 100km squares (mainly TQ, which covers London). We've taken a couple of approaches to this - hand-making a few maps in Google (for example, our Olympics work is mapped here), and using batch processing scripts from ESRI or others to manipulate the data in the geographical fields of our archaeology database, creating latitude and longitude values to accompany the OS grid references. However there is still a good set of data that needs another approach - for example, our site summaries for the last decade and more are available online. These XML-driven pages contain only OSGB data. I plot them very crudely onto our own ESRI-based map application, but would much rather have KML to work with.

So to the point. I came across a great script on the Hairy Spider site that also runs a web service. I wanted to take this further so that (a) I could pass in lots of values, not just one at a time (b) it could handle the TQ-style syntax (c) not keep on hitting friendly Mr Spider's server. The code available is for the convertion from OS eastings and northings to lat/long only and I've not tried to reproduce his "proper" web service, but I do now have something that will work for my needs. I can pass in a querystring like

gr=tq709098,SW465987,tl123456,51232456,512300245600

and get back something like:



50.8618352280453
0.431144625126249
tq709098


50.7318874223712
-5.59642485933937
SW465987


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
tl123456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
51232456


52.0968934973257
-0.358719120254802
512300245600



[note that the last three values in the query were all for the same grid reference but in different formats, producing the same lat/long]
For me this is pretty useful. I may well extend this to take more parameters and pass out KML, but the main thing is having a means to convert the data on the fly over HTTP.

Many thanks to Hairy Spider for doing all the hard work on this. I've tested the outputs and they're very close to the OS's own tool, so good work HS!

Next thing is to use this. I'll let you know when I do, and we might also be open about making the service publicly available if that would be of assistance to anyone that might be reading this.