The Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) is an eight-digit unique identifier (a geocode) for every street in the UK.
The Unique Street Reference Number (USRN) is an eight-digit unique identifier (a geocode) for every street in the UK.
USRNs for England and Wales are published in the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) database, the authoritative source of information about streets in England and Wales. The NSG is managed by GeoPlace, [1] a joint venture between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey (OS). GeoPlace is also responsible for centrally managing and allocating USRN ranges to local authorities, which have sole statutory responsibility over assigning USRNs to streets. The locally assigned USRNs are then regularly fed back into the NSG via the Local Street Gazetteers. [2]
USRNs in Scotland are managed by the Improvement Service and recorded in the Street Gazetteer of Scotland, the authoritative street database for Scotland. [3] The data has been available alongside England & Wales data in OS products since 2021, enabled by the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA). [4]
In Northern Ireland USRNs are overseen by the Department for Infrastructure.
The USRN is available from the NSG and included in Ordnance Survey's OS MasterMap Highways Network product. USRNs can also be found on the site Find My Street created by GeoPlace.
From 1 July 2020, the Government requires USRNs and Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs) to be available under an Open Government Licence (OGL). [5] The OS Open USRN dataset is derived from the OS MasterMap Highways Network product.
The Government Digital Service has mandated the UPRN and USRN [6] as "the public sector standard for referencing and sharing property and street information".
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.
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.
A TOID is a unique reference identifier assigned by the Ordnance Survey to identify every topographical feature in Great Britain.
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.
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 National Street Gazetteer (NSG) is an official database of all streets in England and Wales. It is compiled by the company GeoPlace from Local Street Gazetteers data, which is updated every month by the 175 local highway authorities. NSG acts as the authoritative reference dataset for streets in England and Wales.
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 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.
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 ONS Open Geography portal from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) provides free and open access to the definitive source of geographic information products, web applications, story maps, services and APIs. All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, unless otherwise stated.
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. Over 42 million locations have UPRNs, which can be found in Ordnance Survey's AddressBase databases.
The GB1900 project was a crowd-sourced initiative to create a gazetteer, released under an open licence, by transcribing and geolocating all the place names on the second edition County Series of six inch to one mile maps of Great Britain, published by Ordnance Survey between 1888 and 1914, and thus out of copyright. Almost 1,200 volunteers contributed. Subsequent research found that they were "motivated by personal interest in the maps, in places that held meaning for them, and in how places had changed."
