Ordnance Survey reveals transformation in how we access data

Ordnance Survey (OS) has announced its most significant digital transformation milestone in over a decade, providing faster and easier access to location data for customers across the public and private sectors.

OS has been providing accurate location data and insights for governments, businesses, and consumers for more than 230 years. Now, it said a “huge investment” in OS data will enable faster and easier access to Britain’s most authoritative location data and enable accurate mapping data to be at centre of core decision making, products, and services.

Previously when accessing data from Ordnance Survey (OS), customers had to select from pre-packaged products and this meant the features they received were pre-determined. Now customers can pick and choose which geographic features they need from nine themes including address, buildings, land use, transport, and water.

“There has been an increased demand from our customers recently for a more personalised service in relation to accessing OS data, but also a need to ensure our data is as analytical as possible and enables them to answer location-based questions more quickly than ever before,” said Dean Paulley, strategic product manager at Ordnance Survey.

Paulley said OS can now deliver “a personalised service for our customers, as well as taking the opportunity to redesign all of our large scale data. Therefore our transformation was two-fold: not only did it enhance and improve the data offering for customers, but it ensured the access was as simple and secure as possible.

“We now have a consistent product offering which includes all our large scale data called the OS National Geographic Database (OS NGD), as well as new personalised services where customers can easily identify and access only the data they need with OS Select+Build and OS NGD APIs.

“A huge improvement”

OS can now deliver daily updates via the OS NGD, which Paulley said is a significant step forward on weekly updates and will accelerate efficiencies and enable organisations to make critical decisions more quickly.

“Even though it has only been in the market for less than a year, there has been evidence of rapid success for customers using the new tools,” he said.

“OS Select+Build has been described as a huge improvement by long-standing customers because of the way it enables users to access and interact with data. This type of product offering would not have been possible ten years ago, so one of the other challenges is being able to ensure futureproofing for the product for the next ten years and beyond. The OS NGD has been built in a nimble and flexible way, ensuring we can improve and enhance not only the data but also how the data is accessed as larger numbers of customers adopt the new offer, but also as market requirements develop and change in the future. Indeed we have already been able to enhance the offer, releasing road speed data for Britain’s road network and also a new OS NGD Tiles API to support visualisation use cases, both only six months after launch.