One map to rule them all: UK's Ordnance Survey rolls out its Data Hub and the juicy API goodness that lies therein
- Reference: 1593597674
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/01/os_data_hub/
- Source link:
The move comes a fortnight after the UK Cabinet Office's Geospatial Commission [2]unveiled a strategy to provide the country with a "coherent national location data framework" by 2025.
Unlocking the secrets held within the OS would be good start, and to that end users are being given access to the MasterMap, a highly detailed location dataset, free of charge. Sort of.
The new and enhanced APIs being unveiled come with £1,000 of free access per month to data such as the OS's 1:25,000 leisure mapping and road network data and unlimited access to OS OpenData products. Burn through that £1,000, however, the OS will expect to be paid for its premium wares.
Those looking warily at the organisation's [3]occasionally borked apps will be relieved to know that the Data Hub is "completely separate".
The APIs include tooling to pull both vector and raster data from the OS's system and direct access to the MasterMap to get down to layers such as the building level. "We're including the building height attributes in the vector tile service buildings layer, which will enable developers to create essentially 3D models of cities all across Great Britain," explained OS developer advocate John Hoopes.
The data is served up in either GML or GeoJSON format, which should make life easier for developers keen to build the OS's smarts into their own apps.
The team is also opening up a Downloads API to pull data products locally as well as a Names API lookup service for place names, postcodes, roads and so on. A Linked Identifiers API will also assist in linking properties, streets and MasterMap features.
Royalties for offline usage are also being cut by 80 per cent and the gang is also rolling out the AddressBase Core product, a flat-file data set of 33 million addresses across Great Britain.
The National Geospatial Database itself has more than 500 million geographic features and is kept fresh by 20,000 updates a day from data collected by over 200 surveyors, two aircraft and a drone team. The MasterMaps highways network on the Data Hub is updated every month, the topography layer every six weeks and the water network every quarter. Site and greenspaces are updated every six months while the path network gets an update annually.
The system itself runs on a selection of open-source libraries, bespoke code and PaaS technologies. The OS told us that most of the stack is hosted on Azure and "API management comes from Google".
Sadly for those hoping for a play with the organisation's recent [4]Moon map , the coverage only extends as far as Great Britain. ®
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://osdatahub.os.uk
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unlocking-the-power-of-locationthe-uks-geospatial-strategy
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/17/ordnance_survey_app/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/15/ordnance_survey_moon_map/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Have you seen [1]What 3 Words ?
[1] https://what3words.com
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Ugh. Proprietary product with good marketing.
Meanwhile, OS Opendata is on a very encouraging trajectory.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Agree, my problem with What 3 Words is I can't use it without an app, which is fine right up until I'm in some sort of emergency situation and don't have access to the internet. Or even just walking in the countryside with patchy data.
Still alright for parcel deliveries if using an address is too old hat.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
My problem with W3W is that even if you remember the three words but put them in the wrong order, you end up on the other side of the planet if you're lucky.
And if you mis-remember the words, you end up somewhere entirely random.
At least with a postcode if you misremember (or the equipment misreads) "W1" as "W2", it stands a chance of still being delivered. With W3W it could be sent ANYWHERE in the country (if you're lucky).
W3W was a great idea but mixing up the words used for adjacent locations, essentially at random, was a stupid idea. "cat egg banana" should be somewhere near "cat egg band" and maybe even "bat egg banana".
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Lee D "W3W was a great idea but mixing up the words used for adjacent locations, essentially at random, was a stupid idea. "cat egg banana" should be somewhere near "cat egg band" and maybe even "bat egg banana"."
I hear what you're saying but the whole point is that if you get the worlds slightly wrong, it's absolutely obvious. They didn't assign them at random: more like the exact opposite of what you have suggested, so that close verbal matches are so geographically distant they are less easy to confuse.
That isn't the case with grid refs, which already satisfy your requirement to have similar addresses adjacent.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
I pretty sure you don't need an Internet connection to use What 3 Words, it downloads it database when you first use the app (which indexes GPS locations to 3 words).
re: proprietary product
Sure W3W is proprietary, but the general principle of being able to convert numerical grid references to words is not proprietary, whatever W3W think (and I'm no fan of their litigious approach). You don't really need maps at all for an address database, you just need a coordinate system.
OS already has a decent coordinate system, AAnnnnnn which gives you a 100x100m box. Maybe we shoud see if there is some way of adding a couple of numbers to a postcode to make it more precise?
I know the biggest outcode is IV27, over 3600km² . I don't know about the size of the incodes (although I know they only contain 70 actual letterboxes) so, if all had an official number (I suspect they don't), that number modulo 70 would tie to an actual letterbox.
Out in the country, though, it's still problematic. UK is about 250000km² so you need to address about 25 billion 10m² boxes. Maybe 8 digit case-insensitive alphanumerics (excluding 1,0,I,O) would do? If we factored enormous postcodes like IV27 we could maybe get down to Outcode + 4 alphanumerics?
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
or this;
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/28/21272954/google-maps-plus-code-geolocation-digital-address-six-digit
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Propriety, patented, private with no open use. Run by a private company with a fondness for take-down requests and deleting critical comments. No thanks.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
I wonder if postcodes.io might add this as a backend.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Royal Mail still manage a definitive list of PostCodes - that hasn't changed. As they licence the data on commercial terms "competing" databases aren't really "competitors" - just people using out of date/out of licence databases or choosing to use the various open alternatives - which can be useful and functional but don't give the resolution and precision of the Post Office product. One might argue that the OS 'know' where the houses are - but then the Post Office 'knows' which of them have letter boxes!
The whys and wherefores of the database being a commercially licenced product are a separate issue - but like everything - someone has to pay - OS could take it on, but if it's fully open then you are assuming that costs will be borne by tax payers.
Re: Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Are you sure that you haven't mixed up two separate companies there? I thought that the Royal Mail delivered letters, whereas the Post Office prosecuted their employees and had them sent to prison on the basis of false information from their own systems. Anything else the Post Office does is of limited interest to me, as I will be using alternatives for the foreseeable future. They used to be part of the same state-owned company, but got separated out.
I think it's the Royal Mail who maintain the postcode database.
Could this become the official UK postcode and address database?
Since the Royal Mail was privatised and became just another delivery company, I believe that no-one holds a definitive list of address and postcode data for the UK. Does this mean that the OS is now going to take on that role?
The use of lots of different ("competing"!) address databases causes confusion, and occupants of new-build properties are sometimes unable to receive goods by post, or even sign up for utility contracts, because their address doesn't yet exist on the database used by the supplier or carrier. It would be nice if some official gummint-backed organisation could take on the job of providing an official, definitive address database, with a public API or endpoint. The OS is well set up to do this, as (I believe) it maintains the most up-to-date records of what's actually happening on the ground.