Database
In 2005 the central government of the UK has required local authorities to modernise their processes to take advantage of new technologies and provide better linked up services to their residents and businesses. One of the key ways to achieve this goal has been to develop one address resource for their entire local authority area. This has ultimately meant that a resident may notify a council of their change of address at one place without having to repeat the process throughout a number of service areas within an authority.
As part of this process the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) was created. This is a central repository or “hub” for all LLPGs and coordinates the many LLPGs created by local authorities. It also enforces the compliance of all LLPGs with the national standard for the representation of address information, British Standard 7666 (BS7666).
Largely through pressure from the central UK government for a consistent address resource the NLPG has become UK’s definitive address infrastructure. However, the development of the NLPG has been held back by arguments between local authorities and the national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, who are required to act as a trading entity. This has led to the NLPG being unable to compel local authorities to maintain their LLPGs as well as protracted negotiations regarding issues of ownership of address data.
In May 2005 local authorities in the UK signed an agreement (Mapping Services Agreement) with suppliers of geographic data, which included Ordnance Survey and the managers of the NLPG. This solved the issues surrounding ownership of address data and contained many restrictions on the use of LLPGs by local authorities as well as compulsions upon local authorities to maintain their LLPGs.
However, simultaneously, Ordnance Survey published a proposal to develop an alternative address infrastructure called the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI). This involved Ordnance Survey taking ownership of the NLPG and then selling it back to the same local authorities that had created the LLPGs that make up the NLPG. This provoked another round of arguments between Ordnance Survey and local authorities. The NSAI has now been abandoned by Ordnance Survey.
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. The venture underwent a process of approval by the Office of Fair Trading, which passed a judgement allowing the venture on 15 February 2011.
Following the setting up of GeoPlace, NLPG data has been brought together with Ordnance Survey, Valuation Office Agency and Royal Mail data into the National Address Gazetteer infrastructure. The National Address Gazetteer infrastructure is the single source from which the AddressBase products from Ordnance Survey are developed. Through agreement between Ordnance Survey and Scotland’s Improvement Service, working on behalf of Scottish Local Government, the National Address Gazetteer includes DT
Ordnance Survey Ireland was the national mapping agency of the Republic 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.
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 Norwegian Mapping Authority (NMA) is Norway's national mapping agency, dealing with land surveying, geodesy, hydrographic surveying, cadastre and cartography. The current director is Johnny Welle. Its headquarters are in Hønefoss and it is a public agency under the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development. NMA was founded in 1773.
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.
Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is the public service department of New Zealand charged with geographical information and surveying functions as well as handling land titles, and managing Crown land and property. The minister responsible is the Minister for Land Information, and was formerly the Minister of Survey and Land Information. LINZ was established in 1996 following the restructure of the Department of Survey and Land Information (DOSLI), which was itself one of the successor organisations to the Department of Lands and Survey.
The Western Australian Land Information Authority operates under the business name of Landgate.
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.
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.
The New South Wales Land and Property Information (NSW LPI), a division of the Department of Finance, Services and Innovation in the government of New South Wales, was the division responsible for land titles, property information, valuation, surveying, and mapping and spatial information in the Australian state of New South Wales. From 1 July 2017, the operation was transferred to Australian Registry Investments, a private consortium, under a 35-year concession with the NSW government. The LPI was subsequently renamed and replaced by the NSW Land Registry Services on 1 December 2017.
SinglePoint is a piece of address management software from Aligned Assets. Its primary function is to act as a search engine that allows the user to search a central address database by entering search terms.
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.
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.
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.
The Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) is an eight-digit unique identifier for every street across Great Britain.
