Biggest step change to location data in a generation

Kate Patfield, Ordnance Survey 

The Ordnance Survey National Geographic Database

WHEN military engineer William Roy started what became an eight-year project to map Scotland by hand with simple compasses, 50ft chains and the naked eye, would he ever have envisaged that more than 250 years later, Great Britain’s trusted location data, gathered by Ordnance Survey surveyors since 1791, would be available through one vast digital database?

Ordnance Survey launched the OS National Geographic Database (OS NGD) in 2022. A huge milestone for the mapping service, this was the biggest step change in access to OS data since the launch of OS MasterMap in 2001.

The OS NGD contains a staggering half a billion geographical features and is updated between 20,000 and 30,000 times a day by a national team of expert surveyors who capture data at ground level, supported by aerial imagery from drones and planes.

The OS NGD contains a staggering half a billion geographical features and is updated between 20,000 and 30,000 times a day by a national team of expert surveyors who capture data at ground level, supported by aerial imagery from drones and planes.

Respected worldwide as one of the most trusted sources of location data for Great Britain, OS has been tasked with delivering data free to the public sector under OS’s contract with government – the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement¹ – via the OS NGD. This allows for the provision of geospatial data across multiple themes, including buildings, transport, structures, addressing and land.

The provision of this data enables the public sector to meet its responsibilities in providing routine but crucial services to the public on a daily basis. This could be anything from providing building information to emergency planning and prevention, as well as asset management, transport and routing buses, city planning, green travel, sustainability projects and access to healthcare.

OS works closely with the public sector to assist during crises and emergencies too. During the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritative location data and OS expertise supported the UK Health Security Agency in its national response plans. And it’s a little known fact that OS is always on call 24/7 to the resilience community, for any emergency or major incident that could require geospatial support. A recent example of mapping for emergencies was the support provided to Devon and Cornwall Police in March when an unexploded bomb was found in Plymouth. OS helped the police with contingency planning and risk analysis during this major incident, which resulted in Plymouth’s biggest evacuation since the Second World War.

Basement presence data.

The provision of this data enables the public sector to meet its responsibilities in providing routine but crucial services to the public on a daily basis. 

To achieve all this, OS has undertaken a huge digital transformation project to create the OS NGD to improve access to this critical data – supporting users across public sector to be more effective, removing data management challenges, saving time and underpinning decision making.

So what can be accessed within the OS NGD? As above, there is a huge and varied range of datasets which are designed to cater for the 6,000 public sector organisations and emergency services which use it, as well as for the private sector through OS partners and commercial terms. One of the database’s unique features is its OS Select+Build facility – described as the Spotify of the mapping databases. OS Select+Build gives users the ability to source the precise data required, selecting and building a bespoke package rather than taking off-the-shelf products, a huge boost in efficiency. In addition to the regular updates to existing data, currently batches of new data are agreed with government and released into the database twice a year. The biggest release since the launch of the OS NGD was in March this year and included enhancements to OS Buildings, with new attributes such as building age, construction material, basement presence and building description to provide richer insights and greater understanding of risks to building structures and the surrounding population.

This is key for emergency services as it gives them that improved situational awareness and insight.

The new enhancements are also expected to be vital for helping the public sector tackle net-zero policy and green initiatives around buildings, helping to develop a better understanding about the energy performance of those buildings, such as insight into reducing carbon emissions from homes or identifying hard-to-heat homes.

Landscape data

One advocate of the field boundary data is the Peak District National Park, which will be using the new data to monitor changes to one of the UK’s best known landscapes, tracking the current picture against OS’s mapping of the park from the 1950s.New landscape data was also included in the release, which will have a significant impact on biodiversity, carbon accounting and environment projects across Great Britain. New field boundary information, which covers rural and moorland areas, now identifies the nature of field boundary features, for vegetated features such as hedgerows and stonewalls. This will help with understanding and assessing biodiversity net gain, as well as monitoring natural capital and carbon accounting. And the new land cover information now links to habitat classification schemes and provides percentage coverage information for natural land cover features, providing customers with that consistent baseline of the natural environment.

One advocate of the field boundary data is the Peak District National Park, which will be using the new data to monitor changes to one of the UK’s best known landscapes, tracking the current picture against OS’s mapping of the park from the 1950s. Previously, the park’s field boundary data could only be acquired from site visits or from aerial/satellite photography.

OS NGD location data is a ‘game-changer’

Access to location data from the OS NGD has recently been hailed as a ‘game-changer’ by the Greater Manchester Ecology Unit (GMEU). Tasked with developing a local nature recovery strategy (LNRS) to reverse nature’s decline across the city-region, the GMEU has been able to extract the layers of mapping that it needs from the NGD to create its own baseline habitat and land use map. This has enabled it to start assessing where the priorities for nature recovery are in the area.

OS NGD data has also been used to model species movement across the landscape by giving an insight into landscape permeability and a very visual indication of existing corridors.OS NGD data has also been used to model species movement across the landscape by giving an insight into landscape permeability and a very visual indication of existing corridors. Part of the LNRS is to facilitate the protection and expansion of those networks for wildlife, making sure that species across Greater Manchester, such as great crested newts, farmland birds, invertebrates and water voles can move around more easily using natural corridors which have previously been impacted by factors such as habitat degradation, fragmentation, changes in land use and climate change.

Apart from providing the insights the GMEU needed to develop its strategy, as for the Peak District National Park, the data has freed up resource. Some of the data provided by the OS NGD would previously have been gathered by ecologists out on the ground. The unit will also be able to use the new field boundary and land cover type and percentage cover just released in March.

The OS NGD will continue to grow with the next release in September. There will be further OS Buildings data with information on the number of floors, delivering richer land use information and adding data on what geographical features interact with bridges to continue supporting the emergency services. 

Kate Patfield, Ordnance Survey

www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk

@OrdnanceSurvey

Notes

The Ordnance Survey National Geographic Database can be accessed via the OS Data Hub osdatahub.os.uk. OS NGD data is available to customers both via commercial terms for OS partners, and for free to public sector customers through the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA). All images ©Ordnance Survey. There will be further OS buildings data with information on the number of floors, delivering richer land use information and adding data on what geographical features interact with bridges to continue supporting the emergency services.

1 See https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/customers/public-sector/public-sectorgeospatial-agreement

Percentage of land cover data.