GeoPlace

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GeoPlace is an organisation (LLP) established in 2010 that oversees the production and maintenance of national address and street gazetteers created and maintained with input from all local authorities in England, Wales and (later) Scotland. GeoPlace is a public sector limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association (LGA) and Ordnance Survey.

Contents

History

On 3 December 2010, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government announced the formation of GeoPlace to provide a freely-available national address gazetteer. This is a joint venture between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey, which involved the acquisition of Intelligent Addressing. The venture underwent a process of approval by the Office of Fair Trading, which passed a judgement allowing the venture on 15 February 2011. [1]

In 2020, GeoPlace Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) and Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) data used to identify homes and streets was made freely available, opening up opportunities for the development of 'property passports' and logbooks, [2] as well as supporting other government departments such as the Department for Transport. [3]

Activities

GeoPlace oversees the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) and the National Address Gazetteer. The National Land and Property Gazetteer has been synchronised with address data from Ordnance Survey - Address Layer 2 (AL2). AL2 also incorporates Royal Mail Postcode Address File data. The combination of datasets from Local Government and Ordnance Survey is designed to create one definitive national address gazetteer. Through agreement with Scotland's Improvement Service Company, coverage has been extended to include Scotland.

Related Research Articles

The Postcode Address File (PAF) is a database that contains all known "delivery points" and postcodes in the United Kingdom. The PAF is a collection of over 29 million Royal Mail postal addresses and 1.8 million postcodes. It is available in a variety of formats including FTP download and compact disc, and was previously available as digital audio tape. As owner of the PAF, Royal Mail is required by section 116 of the Postal Services Act 2000 to maintain the data and make it available on reasonable terms. A charge is made for lookup services or wholesale supply of PAF data. Charges are regulated by Ofcom. It includes small user residential, small user organisation and large user organisation details. There have been requests as part of the Open Data campaign for the PAF to be released by the government free of charge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ordnance Survey Ireland</span> Former national mapping agency of Ireland

Ordnance Survey Ireland was the national mapping agency of Ireland. It was established on 4 March 2002 as a body corporate. It was the successor to the former Ordnance Survey of Ireland. It and the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) were themselves the successors to the Irish operations of the British Ordnance Survey. OSI was part of the Irish public service. OSI was headquartered at Mountjoy House in the Phoenix Park in Dublin, which had previously been the headquarters of the British Ordnance Survey in Ireland until 1922.

Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) is the official mapping agency of Northern Ireland. The agency ceased to exist separately on 1 April 2008 when it became part of Land and Property Services, an executive agency of the Northern Ireland Department of Finance and Personnel, along with the Rate Collection Agency, the Valuation and Lands Agency, and the Land Registry.

The OS MasterMap is the premier digital product of the Ordnance Survey. It was launched in November 2001. It is a database that records every fixed feature of Great Britain larger than a few meters in one continuous digital map. Every feature is given a unique TOID, a simple identifier that includes no semantic information. Typically each TOID is associated with a polygon that represents the area on the ground that the feature covers, in National Grid coordinates. OS MasterMap is offered in themed "layers", for example a road layer and a building layer, each linked to a number of TOIDs. Pricing of licenses for OS MasterMap data depends on: the total area requested, the layers licensed, the number of TOIDs in the layers, the period in years of the data usage.

A Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) is an address database maintained by local authorities, who are responsible for creating all addresses. However, until recently those same local authorities have not held a unified and consistent list of addresses within their areas. This has led to various services within individual local authorities maintaining separate and incompatible address databases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStreetMap</span> Collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed geodata sources. OpenStreetMap is freely licensed under the Open Database License and as a result commonly used to make electronic maps, inform turn-by-turn navigation, assist in humanitarian aid and data visualisation. OpenStreetMap uses its own topology to store geographical features which can then be exported into other GIS file formats. The OpenStreetMap website itself is an online map, geodata search engine and editor.

The National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI) was a database proposed by the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) on 26 May 2005 with the intention of creating a single repository of addresses for the UK. The proposal encountered numerous objections, particularly from local authorities who argued that such a repository already existed in the form of the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG). Currently proposals for the NSAI have been suspended.

The National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) is an initiative in England and Wales to provide a definitive and consistent address infrastructure. Up until recently Great Britain has not held a single list of all addresses in the country, meaning that many government and private services have not been sure if addresses from differing sources refer to the same or different properties.

The Mapping Services Agreement (MSA) is a licensing contract between local authorities in the United Kingdom and suppliers of geographic data. Most of its contents are covered by commercial in confidence requirements. The general outcome of the MSA, however, is the supply of geographic data to local authorities and the defining of licensing issues regarding address data.

The National Street Gazetteer (NSG) is a database of all streets in England and Wales compiled from the responsible highway authorities which is restricted to local authorities and statutory undertakers. The database has 1,486,432 million streets backed by 18,865,643 features. The data is published online by findmystreet.co.uk by Exegesis which was commissioned by GeoPlace in 2018.

The Great Britain Historical GIS is a spatially enabled database that documents and visualises the changing human geography of the British Isles, although is primarily focussed on the subdivisions of the United Kingdom mainly over the 200 years since the first census in 1801. The project is currently based at the University of Portsmouth, and is the provider of the website A Vision of Britain through Time.

The One Scotland Gazetteer is the definitive national land, property and address dataset for Scotland that is published by Spatial Information Service within the Improvement Service. It is compiled using information from all 32 Scottish councils and produced to common standards and specification. It is not to be confused with the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF) which is only a list of mail delivery locations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aligned Assets</span> Software company in the United Kingdom

Aligned Assets was bought out by software company, Idox plc in June 2021. Now operating under the Idox banner, the company continues to develop and deliver address management and gazetteer software local authorities, the emergency services, utilities and the commercial sector. They almost exclusively work with the AddressBase products from the Ordnance Survey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ordnance Survey</span> National mapping agency for Great Britain

The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose, which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was also a more general and nationwide need in light of the potential threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. Since 1 April 2015, the Ordnance Survey has operated as Ordnance Survey Ltd, a government-owned company, 100% in public ownership. The Ordnance Survey Board remains accountable to the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology. It was also a member of the Public Data Group.

Crown Copyright has been a long-standing copyright protection applied to official works, and at times artistic works, produced under royal or official supervision. In 2006, The Guardian newspaper's Technology section began a "Free Our Data" campaign, calling for data gathered by authorities at public expense to be made freely available for reuse by individuals. In 2010 with the creation of the Open Government Licence and the Data.gov.uk site it appeared that the campaign had been mostly successful, and since 2013 the UK has been consistently named one of the leaders in the open data space.

The National Address Gazetteer is a database designed to provide a definitive source of publicly owned spatial address data for Great Britain. It is a culmination of Local Land and Property Gazetteers and other datasets: Address Layer 2 (AL2) and Royal Mail PAF data. The LLPGs, which make up a portion of the data, are created and maintained with input from all local authorities in England and Wales.

The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) is a unique number for every addressable location—e.g., a building, a bus stop, a post box, a feature in the landscape, or a defibrillator—in Great Britain and can be found in Ordnance Survey's AddressBase databases. Over 42 million locations have UPRNs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unique Street Reference Number</span>

The Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) is an eight-digit unique identifier for every street across Great Britain. 

References

  1. OFT decision - archived edition of full text published on 23 February 2011. Retrieved: 30 September 2021.
  2. Shoffman, Marc (9 June 2020). "Industry groups take first steps towards system for property passports and logbooks". Property Industry Eye. Retrieved 30 September 2021.
  3. Ames, Chris (15 July 2020). "Streetworks by Numbers". Highways Magazine. Retrieved 30 September 2021.