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The changing role of national mapping organisations: A case study of Ordnance Survey
Vanessa Lawrence
Director General and Chief Executive, Ordnance Survey
E-mail:vanessa.lawrence@ordnancesurvey.co.uk
Vanessa Lawrence
Director General and Chief Executive, Ordnance Survey
E-mail:vanessa.lawrence@ordnancesurvey.co.uk
1 Introduction
Providing consistent, reliable mapping for the nation is a role that jurisdictions worldwide have found to be necessary for a number of core purposes such as planning, property valuation and national defence. National mapping organisations (NMOs) have played a vital part in enabling these functions. However, we are in the throes of an information revolution in which geography and geographic information (GI) are assuming greater relevance in a much wider context. GI is moving to the mainstream. This paper illustrates Ordnance Survey’s activities today with respect to these developments.
2 A brief history
Ordnance Survey was established as a military organisation in 1791 at a time of great turbulence in Europe. Fearing a French invasion led by Napoleon, the British Government instructed that a map of the south coast be drawn up. The first map depicting Kent, the most vulnerable county to invasion, is shown in Figure 1 below. This momentous decision led to the establishment of Ordnance Survey and the subsequent mapping of the whole of Great Britain (the countries of England, Wales and Scotland within the United Kingdom).
Figure 1: Extract from the first Ordnance Survey map of Kent, finalised in 1801
Ordnance Survey continued to maintain and develop topographic mapping of Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century. By 1895 a national set of mapping at 25 inches to the mile was completed and a new metric National Grid was introduced following retriangulation in 1938.
In 1971 Ordnance Survey embarked upon a revolutionary new programme of digitising all 230,000 of its large-scale paper map sheets. The primary objective in undertaking this was to improve internal map production efficiency (Figure 2); the widespread use of GI that we see today was unthinkable at the time. By 1995, nearly a quarter of a century later, this immense programme of work was completed and Ordnance Survey had enabled Great Britain to become the first country in the world to truly enter the digital era.
Figure 2: One of the earliest plots from a digitised 1:2500 digital map, 1974
3 The evolving role of national mapping organisations
There are a range of external drivers and forces for change that are directly affecting NMOs worldwide. These can be summarised as follows:
4 Ordnance Survey today
Ordnance Survey is now an independent government department employing 1,550 staff across the country and continuing the work begun two centuries ago. Maintaining the “master map” of the nation is still our primary reason for existence. Great Britain is fortunate in having one of the most intensive and systematic mapping regimes in the world. Surveying is undertaken at 1:1250 scale in urban areas, 1:2500 in rural areas and 1:10,000 in mountain and moorland through both cyclic revision “sweeps” and field surveys triggered by change intelligence. This level of detail is also rigorously maintained through a comprehensive maintenance process which feeds 5000 updates to the database every day and means that all major changes to buildings and roads are recorded within six months.
Since October 2001 the business has been driven forward to a new vision, i.e.
Ordnance Survey and its partners will be the content provider of choice for location-based information in the new information economy.
4.1 Governance
In April 1999 Ordnance Survey became a public sector trading fund, giving it more commercial flexibility, a greater responsibility for its finances and a commitment to making a profit. Trading revenue is now in excess of £100 million per annum. Ordnance Survey is a powerful brand name primarily renowned for high quality paper maps, of which around four million are sold per year. Although maps are an important component of our business, over 80% of revenue is now derived from digital data sales.
To remain viable, Ordnance Survey must position itself at the forefront of the information economy, in terms of both product and service portfolio and also in terms of culture and mindset. Agility, customer focus, leadership and service are all crucial to survival. Heritage and authority are no longer sufficient.
The information industry is one of intense global competition, with rising customer needs and expectations determining the development of new services and innovations. Ordnance Survey is already a significant force in this evolution; in 1999 its data was independently estimated to underpin around £100 billion per annum of British economic activity in the public and private sectors . This is a substantial and, to many, a surprising figure – but one that we intend to build on even further as we drive forward our plans to develop as an e-business and see the true benefit of GI realised within Great Britain.
4.2 The national interest
With around 80% of information estimated to contain a spatial content, Ordnance Survey has a critically important role in developing an underpinning framework which can join together both public and private sector information. In support of this, a Pan-Government Agreement was launched in 2003 giving over 500 British government departments and agencies access to a wide range of digital map data. This is a significant step towards ensuring that common standards are consistently used for decision-making by the public and private sectors, and a major drive forward to both joining up Government and the provision of all Government services electronically.
A proportion of our work, however, is carried out in the national interest at cost under the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) with Government. This includes specific surveying and mapping activities that are vital to the national interest but cannot be justified on commercial grounds; like any country, Great Britain has remote areas that are of low interest except in times of emergency and significant incidents. This agreement ensures that even the most remote areas are mapped in great detail and are updated on a regular basis. This is of high strategic value and is vital in emergency situations, such as the Foot and Mouth disease outbreak that swept across the British countryside in 2001.
By the same token, our national series of paper maps are produced principally to meet customers’ needs; many individual sheets are unprofitable. The first choice for millions of walkers, cyclists and motorists, Ordnance Survey’s paper map series are a reflection of our commitment to national consistency. For example, if our OS Landranger (1:50,000) series were to be produced on a purely commercial basis, it would only offer 40% national coverage.
4.3 Business model
Our new business model is formed around the following principles:
4.4 OS MasterMap
As discussed earlier, Ordnance Survey’s primary digital products were originally electronic versions of their paper predecessors, reflecting a bird’s-eye, cartographic view of the world. Just as the information world has moved from an era of filing cabinets to electronic databases, location-based data products need to be compatible with the information economy and genuinely fit for today’s purposes. Unstructured topographic geometry is no longer sufficient.
The digitising programme, which lasted from 1971 to 1995, created the first generation of nation-wide large-scale digital data. The second generation is realised by OS MasterMapTM., the result of a major programme of investment to re-engineer all 230,000 map tiles, all held in flat file format, into real-world objects in a single database. Nationally maintained and consistent, it comprises over 400 million objects with unique reference numbers (called TOIDs) for all features (Figure 3), providing a common denominator for disparate datasets held within the public and private sectors in Great Britain.
Figure 3: Excerpt of OS MasterMap topography layer. Every geographic object has a unique TOID for data association.
OS MasterMap is a seamless, national and layered database of GI across Great Britain. It also incorporates the supporting customer selection and delivery service and will, in time, supersede all existing Ordnance Survey detailed datasets developed over the past 15 or more years. From that base all other datasets at varying resolutions will eventually be derived, as far as possibly by full automation. Each “layer” can be broken into themes but the entire database will be internally consistent and interoperable (Figure 4). Released in November 2001, the OS MasterMap Topography Layer is a digital, large-scale model of the topographical landscape of Great Britain and is broken down into nine themes: roads, tracks and paths; land; buildings; water; rail; height; heritage; structures; and administrative boundaries. This layer has been subsequently enhanced through the release of Address, Integrated Transport Network and Imagery layers.
Figure 4: The current layers of OS MasterMap (topography, imagery, addresses and integrated transport network)
OS MasterMap can be ordered online with the supply of change-only updates saving customers both time and effort (Figure 5). The result is customer-specified data, allowing users to choose only the specific information they need. Yet this is only the beginning of our vision, with future releases planned to provide a 24*7 supply, additional layers of information and enhanced web services through portals, hubs and customised web sites.
Figure 5: OS MasterMap online ordering service
4.5 Digital National Framework
Crucially, OS MasterMap is based on the principles of the Digital National Framework (DNF), a set of enabling principles and operational rules that underpin and facilitate the integration of geo-referenced information from multiple sources. It is a conceptual framework primarily concerned with geospatial information and its relationship to other data and information (Figure 6). Based on the ‘capture once, use many times’ principle, it introduces a common methodology and standards to enable information users to more effectively and efficiently realise the benefits of GI. First established in 1999-2000 in consultation with the GI community, it is in recognition of the absence of a formal documented approach to support a national geo-referencing infrastructure in Great Britain and will be the basis upon which OS MasterMap will be built and operated.
Figure 6: The full DNF model underpins the framework for geographic information where users can georeference their information against real world features, using TOIDs. User information can then be exchanged with others reliably and confidently based on a common set of real world objects.
GI is being used in more ways than ever before in both the public and private sectors. From improving emergency service response times to planning pipeline networks; enabling precision marketing to analysing environmental trends; locating the nearest pizza restaurant to setting insurance premiums, GI is increasingly at the heart of business and leisure.
4.6 Partnership and collaboration
Ordnance Survey does not operate in isolation. Partners are integral to the business. “Upstream” partnership gives real benefit in terms of maintaining and improving our databases. An example of this is our CODES (collection of data from external sources) programme, whereby property developers supply pre-build information to speed the data collection process and to enable the provision of valuable intelligence to organisations such as utilities for their network planning.
“Downstream” partnerships allow others to add value to the core data and develop channels to market. Location-based services, for instance, are being developed by partners to provide personalised information to individuals in new and compelling ways, far removed from traditional mapping (Figure 7). As a data provider, Ordnance Survey does not compete in the applications market other than for products needed in the national interest, such as our core paper map ranges.
Figure 7: An example of a commercial navigation service based on Ordnance Survey large-scale information
Our partner programme gives the opportunity for closer working in ways that bring mutual benefit to all parties. We aim to develop relationships with the partner community that are characterised by mutual co-operation and responsibility for the achievement of a specified goal. Additionally, for individuals or companies whose ideas are at the conceptual stage, we run a developer programme which offers an inexpensive twelve-month contract and access to substantial amounts of data for development into potential applications.
Another important area of collaboration is research. Ordnance Survey has a vibrant research facility which undertakes fundamental, innovative activities in information, computer and geographic information science aimed at sustaining the long term future of the business. Research questions cover topics such as generalisation, automated data capture and spatial cognition. These complex challenges warrant collaborative and often multi-disciplinary research. We see this as a vital investment because we recognise that our future product and service portfolio – and hence our future existence – depends on research and continual innovation.
4.7 Paper Maps
Technological advances have broadened the way in which paper mapping can be accessed and delivered, not merely as ‘off the shelf’ products. An example of this is the ‘Get-A-Map’ facility on our website where sections of mapping can be printed out for free. In addition, ‘OS Select’ is a web-based service for specifying and ordering customised site-centred mapping. Further technological developments will pave the way for high quality print-on-demand map production. To an extent this is available today through ‘OS Options’, a network of high street shops with the facility to access a direct link to Ordnance Survey’s ‘live’ large-scale data and provide the customer with a customised plot or digital data file. We are actively involved in research to develop new map simplification and generalisation tools which will bring the holy grail of automated small-scale map production from the large-scale database much closer to reality.
5 Conclusions
Ordnance Survey’s journey since 1791 has been one of profound and often turbulent change. Technology, society and government do not stay still – indeed, they are evolving more rapidly than ever – and maintaining agility and leadership in the face of change is of paramount importance.
The principal characteristics of Ordnance Survey today can be summarised thus: firstly, our role has shifted from map maker to the nation to providers of the nation’s geographic referencing framework; secondly, our focus is more than ever on meeting the needs of our customers; thirdly, we are working in increasing cooperation with our partners.
NMOs have traditionally collected and supplied paper mapping – GI in explicit form – for a limited number of uses. Digital GI can now be stored, integrated and delivered in tandem with mainstream information systems, provided that it is fit for purpose. Geography is more relevant than ever to government, industry and society, but the map is often implicit, the geography hidden. As NMOs, we have a fundamental role to play in providing the underpinning national framework to enable improved decision making and thereby delivering genuine economic benefit and an improved quality of life.
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful for the assistance of Mark Stileman in preparing this paper.
Providing consistent, reliable mapping for the nation is a role that jurisdictions worldwide have found to be necessary for a number of core purposes such as planning, property valuation and national defence. National mapping organisations (NMOs) have played a vital part in enabling these functions. However, we are in the throes of an information revolution in which geography and geographic information (GI) are assuming greater relevance in a much wider context. GI is moving to the mainstream. This paper illustrates Ordnance Survey’s activities today with respect to these developments.
2 A brief history
Ordnance Survey was established as a military organisation in 1791 at a time of great turbulence in Europe. Fearing a French invasion led by Napoleon, the British Government instructed that a map of the south coast be drawn up. The first map depicting Kent, the most vulnerable county to invasion, is shown in Figure 1 below. This momentous decision led to the establishment of Ordnance Survey and the subsequent mapping of the whole of Great Britain (the countries of England, Wales and Scotland within the United Kingdom).
Figure 1: Extract from the first Ordnance Survey map of Kent, finalised in 1801
Ordnance Survey continued to maintain and develop topographic mapping of Great Britain throughout the nineteenth century. By 1895 a national set of mapping at 25 inches to the mile was completed and a new metric National Grid was introduced following retriangulation in 1938.
In 1971 Ordnance Survey embarked upon a revolutionary new programme of digitising all 230,000 of its large-scale paper map sheets. The primary objective in undertaking this was to improve internal map production efficiency (Figure 2); the widespread use of GI that we see today was unthinkable at the time. By 1995, nearly a quarter of a century later, this immense programme of work was completed and Ordnance Survey had enabled Great Britain to become the first country in the world to truly enter the digital era.
Figure 2: One of the earliest plots from a digitised 1:2500 digital map, 1974
3 The evolving role of national mapping organisations
There are a range of external drivers and forces for change that are directly affecting NMOs worldwide. These can be summarised as follows:
- Changing models of government: governments across the world are looking carefully at how they can formulate and enforce policies and deliver services in more integrated ways. Many governments are adopting aggressive targets for online service delivery, while voters are increasingly looking for more transparency and accountability within the provision of these services. Options to deregulate, privatise or outsource traditionally public sector activities are continually being reviewed.
- Technology: the advent of mobile communications, the Internet, spatial databases, cheap computing power and fast networks have irrevocably changed the world. Technology allows traditional mapping organisations to realise efficiencies, but it also allows reduces former barriers to competitors entering the market.
- Globalisation: global production, global trade and flows of both resources and capital have intensified competition and are forcing businesses to broaden their strategic horizons. Put simply, you have to focus on your core competences or risk being outflanked. The global marketplace also renders obsolete proprietary or parochial solutions; international standards and interoperability are vital.
- Changing customer needs: customers expect better value and better fitness for purpose and increasingly they are able to directly compare alternative offerings through e-commerce. Furthermore, procurement processes within organisations are tending to be far more rigorous in demonstrating good value. GI accordingly needs to be absolutely focused on customer needs, and drive improvement programmes accordingly.
- cartography is merely one expression of the spatial database;
- geometry is no longer enough: topology, attribution and metadata are assuming greater importance; and
- better maintenance and currency of data is essential
4 Ordnance Survey today
Ordnance Survey is now an independent government department employing 1,550 staff across the country and continuing the work begun two centuries ago. Maintaining the “master map” of the nation is still our primary reason for existence. Great Britain is fortunate in having one of the most intensive and systematic mapping regimes in the world. Surveying is undertaken at 1:1250 scale in urban areas, 1:2500 in rural areas and 1:10,000 in mountain and moorland through both cyclic revision “sweeps” and field surveys triggered by change intelligence. This level of detail is also rigorously maintained through a comprehensive maintenance process which feeds 5000 updates to the database every day and means that all major changes to buildings and roads are recorded within six months.
Since October 2001 the business has been driven forward to a new vision, i.e.
Ordnance Survey and its partners will be the content provider of choice for location-based information in the new information economy.
4.1 Governance
In April 1999 Ordnance Survey became a public sector trading fund, giving it more commercial flexibility, a greater responsibility for its finances and a commitment to making a profit. Trading revenue is now in excess of £100 million per annum. Ordnance Survey is a powerful brand name primarily renowned for high quality paper maps, of which around four million are sold per year. Although maps are an important component of our business, over 80% of revenue is now derived from digital data sales.
To remain viable, Ordnance Survey must position itself at the forefront of the information economy, in terms of both product and service portfolio and also in terms of culture and mindset. Agility, customer focus, leadership and service are all crucial to survival. Heritage and authority are no longer sufficient.
The information industry is one of intense global competition, with rising customer needs and expectations determining the development of new services and innovations. Ordnance Survey is already a significant force in this evolution; in 1999 its data was independently estimated to underpin around £100 billion per annum of British economic activity in the public and private sectors . This is a substantial and, to many, a surprising figure – but one that we intend to build on even further as we drive forward our plans to develop as an e-business and see the true benefit of GI realised within Great Britain.
4.2 The national interest
With around 80% of information estimated to contain a spatial content, Ordnance Survey has a critically important role in developing an underpinning framework which can join together both public and private sector information. In support of this, a Pan-Government Agreement was launched in 2003 giving over 500 British government departments and agencies access to a wide range of digital map data. This is a significant step towards ensuring that common standards are consistently used for decision-making by the public and private sectors, and a major drive forward to both joining up Government and the provision of all Government services electronically.
A proportion of our work, however, is carried out in the national interest at cost under the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) with Government. This includes specific surveying and mapping activities that are vital to the national interest but cannot be justified on commercial grounds; like any country, Great Britain has remote areas that are of low interest except in times of emergency and significant incidents. This agreement ensures that even the most remote areas are mapped in great detail and are updated on a regular basis. This is of high strategic value and is vital in emergency situations, such as the Foot and Mouth disease outbreak that swept across the British countryside in 2001.
By the same token, our national series of paper maps are produced principally to meet customers’ needs; many individual sheets are unprofitable. The first choice for millions of walkers, cyclists and motorists, Ordnance Survey’s paper map series are a reflection of our commitment to national consistency. For example, if our OS Landranger (1:50,000) series were to be produced on a purely commercial basis, it would only offer 40% national coverage.
4.3 Business model
Our new business model is formed around the following principles:
- Maintain and improve the ‘master map’ of Britain from which others will derive benefit, including the development of new layers of information and service improvements.
- Deliver benefit to the nation through stimulating the growth of the location-based information industry.
- Return a surplus to fulfil our Trading Fund obligations and invest in the future in order to maintain our database, enable an effective internal infrastructure and provide improvements to service and product quality.
- Ensure that every activity either generates a profitable revenue, or is clearly in the national interest.
- Avoid competing with partners in application or value-added products.
4.4 OS MasterMap
As discussed earlier, Ordnance Survey’s primary digital products were originally electronic versions of their paper predecessors, reflecting a bird’s-eye, cartographic view of the world. Just as the information world has moved from an era of filing cabinets to electronic databases, location-based data products need to be compatible with the information economy and genuinely fit for today’s purposes. Unstructured topographic geometry is no longer sufficient.
The digitising programme, which lasted from 1971 to 1995, created the first generation of nation-wide large-scale digital data. The second generation is realised by OS MasterMapTM., the result of a major programme of investment to re-engineer all 230,000 map tiles, all held in flat file format, into real-world objects in a single database. Nationally maintained and consistent, it comprises over 400 million objects with unique reference numbers (called TOIDs) for all features (Figure 3), providing a common denominator for disparate datasets held within the public and private sectors in Great Britain.
Figure 3: Excerpt of OS MasterMap topography layer. Every geographic object has a unique TOID for data association.
OS MasterMap is a seamless, national and layered database of GI across Great Britain. It also incorporates the supporting customer selection and delivery service and will, in time, supersede all existing Ordnance Survey detailed datasets developed over the past 15 or more years. From that base all other datasets at varying resolutions will eventually be derived, as far as possibly by full automation. Each “layer” can be broken into themes but the entire database will be internally consistent and interoperable (Figure 4). Released in November 2001, the OS MasterMap Topography Layer is a digital, large-scale model of the topographical landscape of Great Britain and is broken down into nine themes: roads, tracks and paths; land; buildings; water; rail; height; heritage; structures; and administrative boundaries. This layer has been subsequently enhanced through the release of Address, Integrated Transport Network and Imagery layers.
Figure 4: The current layers of OS MasterMap (topography, imagery, addresses and integrated transport network)
OS MasterMap can be ordered online with the supply of change-only updates saving customers both time and effort (Figure 5). The result is customer-specified data, allowing users to choose only the specific information they need. Yet this is only the beginning of our vision, with future releases planned to provide a 24*7 supply, additional layers of information and enhanced web services through portals, hubs and customised web sites.
Figure 5: OS MasterMap online ordering service
4.5 Digital National Framework
Crucially, OS MasterMap is based on the principles of the Digital National Framework (DNF), a set of enabling principles and operational rules that underpin and facilitate the integration of geo-referenced information from multiple sources. It is a conceptual framework primarily concerned with geospatial information and its relationship to other data and information (Figure 6). Based on the ‘capture once, use many times’ principle, it introduces a common methodology and standards to enable information users to more effectively and efficiently realise the benefits of GI. First established in 1999-2000 in consultation with the GI community, it is in recognition of the absence of a formal documented approach to support a national geo-referencing infrastructure in Great Britain and will be the basis upon which OS MasterMap will be built and operated.
Figure 6: The full DNF model underpins the framework for geographic information where users can georeference their information against real world features, using TOIDs. User information can then be exchanged with others reliably and confidently based on a common set of real world objects.
GI is being used in more ways than ever before in both the public and private sectors. From improving emergency service response times to planning pipeline networks; enabling precision marketing to analysing environmental trends; locating the nearest pizza restaurant to setting insurance premiums, GI is increasingly at the heart of business and leisure.
4.6 Partnership and collaboration
Ordnance Survey does not operate in isolation. Partners are integral to the business. “Upstream” partnership gives real benefit in terms of maintaining and improving our databases. An example of this is our CODES (collection of data from external sources) programme, whereby property developers supply pre-build information to speed the data collection process and to enable the provision of valuable intelligence to organisations such as utilities for their network planning.
“Downstream” partnerships allow others to add value to the core data and develop channels to market. Location-based services, for instance, are being developed by partners to provide personalised information to individuals in new and compelling ways, far removed from traditional mapping (Figure 7). As a data provider, Ordnance Survey does not compete in the applications market other than for products needed in the national interest, such as our core paper map ranges.
Figure 7: An example of a commercial navigation service based on Ordnance Survey large-scale information
Our partner programme gives the opportunity for closer working in ways that bring mutual benefit to all parties. We aim to develop relationships with the partner community that are characterised by mutual co-operation and responsibility for the achievement of a specified goal. Additionally, for individuals or companies whose ideas are at the conceptual stage, we run a developer programme which offers an inexpensive twelve-month contract and access to substantial amounts of data for development into potential applications.
Another important area of collaboration is research. Ordnance Survey has a vibrant research facility which undertakes fundamental, innovative activities in information, computer and geographic information science aimed at sustaining the long term future of the business. Research questions cover topics such as generalisation, automated data capture and spatial cognition. These complex challenges warrant collaborative and often multi-disciplinary research. We see this as a vital investment because we recognise that our future product and service portfolio – and hence our future existence – depends on research and continual innovation.
4.7 Paper Maps
Technological advances have broadened the way in which paper mapping can be accessed and delivered, not merely as ‘off the shelf’ products. An example of this is the ‘Get-A-Map’ facility on our website where sections of mapping can be printed out for free. In addition, ‘OS Select’ is a web-based service for specifying and ordering customised site-centred mapping. Further technological developments will pave the way for high quality print-on-demand map production. To an extent this is available today through ‘OS Options’, a network of high street shops with the facility to access a direct link to Ordnance Survey’s ‘live’ large-scale data and provide the customer with a customised plot or digital data file. We are actively involved in research to develop new map simplification and generalisation tools which will bring the holy grail of automated small-scale map production from the large-scale database much closer to reality.
5 Conclusions
Ordnance Survey’s journey since 1791 has been one of profound and often turbulent change. Technology, society and government do not stay still – indeed, they are evolving more rapidly than ever – and maintaining agility and leadership in the face of change is of paramount importance.
The principal characteristics of Ordnance Survey today can be summarised thus: firstly, our role has shifted from map maker to the nation to providers of the nation’s geographic referencing framework; secondly, our focus is more than ever on meeting the needs of our customers; thirdly, we are working in increasing cooperation with our partners.
NMOs have traditionally collected and supplied paper mapping – GI in explicit form – for a limited number of uses. Digital GI can now be stored, integrated and delivered in tandem with mainstream information systems, provided that it is fit for purpose. Geography is more relevant than ever to government, industry and society, but the map is often implicit, the geography hidden. As NMOs, we have a fundamental role to play in providing the underpinning national framework to enable improved decision making and thereby delivering genuine economic benefit and an improved quality of life.
Acknowledgement
The author is grateful for the assistance of Mark Stileman in preparing this paper.