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.
Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic (geospatial) data. It is also known as geomatic(s) engineering. Surveying engineering was the widely used name for geomatic(s) engineering in the past.
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.
Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a location on the Earth's surface. Reverse geocoding, on the other hand, converts geographic coordinates to a description of a location, usually the name of a place or an addressable location. Geocoding relies on a computer representation of address points, the street / road network, together with postal and administrative boundaries.
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.
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.
Address Point is a mapping/GIS data product supplied by Great Britain's national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey. It is based on the UK’s postal mail organisation, the Royal Mail, list of postal addresses, Postcode Address File (PAF). The most significant difference between Royal Mail list and Address Point is that Address Point includes the geographic coordinates of each postal address. This enables users to map the individual addresses.
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 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 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.
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.
