Ordnance Survey digital upgrade for sustainability data –

Ordnance Survey has undergone its latest digital transformation to deliver a range of new environmental and location data.

Ordnance Survey (OS) geospatial data plays a vital role in sustainability, supporting critical infrastructure for green transport and electric vehicles, planning renewable energy, managing climate change related flood risk and drought, and improving waste collection and recycling.

OS will deliver 70 new data enhancements including building age and building construction material, improved coverage of land use, indicative and average road speeds, and improved consistency of address positioning.

This latest investment will enable the data services and solutions company to provide customers with enhanced access to Britain’s most authoritative location data, via the Ordnance Survey Data Hub, driving efficiencies and enabling accurate location data to be at centre of core decision making, products, and services.

The digital transformation will offer customers a personalised data experience when accessing the Ordnance Survey National Geographic Database (NGD), which contains more than half a billion geographical features and receives 20,000 daily updates.

With the ability to create customised data selections, customers will be able to more easily pick and choose data as and when they need it from a simplified data structure, with the potential to speed up processes from a week to a matter of minutes and hours.

The launch represents a significant milestone for OS, with the recently launched OS Select+Build and OS NGD API – Features, as it accelerates efficiencies and enables organisations to make critical decisions and implement viable solutions, as well as automate workflows and reduce data management so they can operate more sustainably.

OS Select+Build adds a new download capability to the OS Data Hub that sits alongside OS OpenData, OS Premium products and existing APIs. The new OS NGD data structure means that customers can build their own data packages from nine themes, including address, buildings, land use, transport, and water.

Each theme is a curated collection of data sets—each of which contains granular feature types pertinent to the theme—and will allow customers to tailor their data experience to better meet their requirements.

“This digital transformation provides our customers with a personalised data experience and the ability to directly get under the bonnet of OS, with data that is easier to access, use, and share,” said John Kimmance, MD of national mapping services. “New technologies and innovations have also helped us deliver on a major Public Sector Geospatial Agreement milestone.

“The volume of data is increasing exponentially, and that means accessing and aggregating this data will be increasingly complex. That’s why it’s important as a trusted location provider we make it as easy as possible for organisations and governments to solve big problems, such as sustainability, delivering public services and building the infrastructure that meets future demand, with valuable insights and accurate location data at their fingertips.”

The geospatial industry is expected to grow significantly between now and 2030 as recognition in the value of location data increases. 

The Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), a contract with the Geospatial Commission, offering almost 6,000 public sector bodies and organisations access to high-quality data and services through the OS Data Hub. It is OS’s data and APIs that underpin and support the delivery of key government services with more than one billion transactions across all PSGA APIs last year.