National Spatial Address Infrastructure

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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.

United Kingdom Country in Europe

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a sovereign country located off the north-western coast of the European mainland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state, the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east, the English Channel to the south and the Celtic Sea to the south-west, giving it the 12th-longest coastline in the world. The Irish Sea separates Great Britain and Ireland. The United Kingdom's 242,500 square kilometres (93,600 sq mi) were home to an estimated 66.0 million inhabitants in 2017.

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.

Originally the NSAI was proposed as a partnership between the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and the Ordnance Survey. As part of this process the IDeA was expected to transfer ownership of the NLPG to Ordnance Survey. However, UK local authorities, who are the creators of all addresses in the UK and are collective owners of the NLPG, expressed great alarm. This was especially emphasised by the proposal that Ordnance Survey would effectively sell back to local authorities their own data. There were also grave concerns regarding Ordnance Survey's ability or suitability to undertake such a project. Indeed, the public statement by the ODPM summarising the responses to the short consultation period stated:

Ordnance Survey National mapping agency of the UK for Great Britain

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 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 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is also a member of the Public Data Group.

"Whilst the Prospectus indicated that the new arrangements should be seen as being partnership based, many local authority respondents commented adversely on OS as key partners within the programme. Generally the comments indicated that local authorities did not believe that OS was suitably qualified for the role it was to perform within NSAI. The criticisms covered both capability and capacity for work on address management, pointing out the key differences between work in this area and OS’s acknowledged skills in mapping. Some responses argued that OS’s previous track record in issues relating to address management (in areas such as the NSG) had not been satisfactory. Many authorities referred to OS’s existing address product (Address-Point) and commented that it was inaccurate, not maintained in a timely way, and didn’t contain the breadth of data contained in NLPG. Some authorities questioned OS’s willingness to act as a partner to local authorities. In contrast several LAs commented favourably on the performance of Intelligent Addressing as their existing service partner". [1]

The National Street Gazetteer is a public database that is kept private, of all streets in England and Wales compiled from the responsible highway authorities which is restricted to local authorities and statutory undertakers.

The Association for Geographic Information (AGI) also had reservations at the time. [2]

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. [3] This is a joint venture between the Local Government Association (LGA) and Ordnance Survey which included the acquisition of Intelligent Addressing, the company that initially envisioned and coordinated the development of the NLPG. [4]

GeoPlace is an organisation (LLP) that oversees the production and maintenance of the national address and street gazetteers, which are created and maintained with input from all local authorities in England and Wales. 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.

Local Government Association organisation representing local government authorities in England and Wales

The Local Government Association (LGA) is an organisation which comprises local authorities in England and Wales. The LGA seeks to promote better local government; it maintains communication between officers in different local authorities to develop best practice. It also represents the interests of local government to national government. 435 authorities are members of the LGA as of 2016, including 349 English councils and the 22 Welsh councils via the Welsh LGA, as well number of smaller authorities including fire authorities and national parks. The Chief Executive is Mark Lloyd.

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 Scottish address data.

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Geomatics Discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information

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 data". It includes geomatics engineering and is related to geospatial science.

Triangulation station Fixed surveying station used in geodetic surveying

A triangulation station, also known as a triangulation pillar, trigonometrical station, trigonometrical point, trig station, trig beacon, or trig point, and sometimes informally as a trig, is a fixed surveying station, used in geodetic surveying and other surveying projects in its vicinity. The nomenclature varies regionally: they are generally known as trigonometrical or triangulation stations in North America, trig points in the United Kingdom, trig pillars in Ireland, trig stations or points in Australia and New Zealand, and trig beacons in South Africa; triangulation pillar is the more formal term for the concrete columns found in the UK.

Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) was 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 metres 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 to 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.

Local eGovernment is eGovernment as it relates to local government, police, fire, national park and transport authorities.

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.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government United Kingdom government ministerial department for housing, communities and local government in England

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is the UK Government department for housing, communities and local government in England. It was established in May 2006 and is the successor to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, established in 2001. Its headquarters is located at 2 Marsham Street in London, occupation of which it shares with the Home Office. It was renamed to add Housing to its title and changed to a ministry in January 2018.

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

Aligned Assets' are a UK-based company from Surrey that develops address management, gazetteer software and Augmented Reality solutions for local authorities, the emergency services and the commercial sector. They almost exclusively work with the AddressBase products from the Ordnance Survey.

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.

Digimap Web mapping and online data delivery service

Digimap is a web mapping and online data delivery service developed by the EDINA national data centre for UK academia. It offers a range of on-line mapping and data download facilities which provide maps and spatial data from Ordnance Survey, British Geological Survey, Landmark Information Group and OceanWise Ltd Ltd.,, Getmapping Ltd, the Environment Agency, OpenStreetMap, CollinsBartholomew Ltd, and various other sources.

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.

References

  1. ↑ http://www.localegov.gov.uk/en/1/1134650730087.html
  2. ↑ http://www.agi.org.uk/POOLED/ARTICLES/BF_TECHART/VIEW.ASP?Q=BF_TECHART_161674
  3. ↑ "National address gazetteer; what it means for local government". NLPG.org.uk. 2011-02-22. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2019-03-02.
  4. ↑ "New Ordnance Survey and Local Government joint venture acquires Intelligent Addressing and ends address confusion" (PDF). Iahub.net. Retrieved 2016-01-27.
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