Ordnance Survey

Southampton, England—Ordnance Survey (OS) is Great Britain's national mapping agency. It is responsible for creating and updating the master map of the entire country, from which it produces and markets a wide range of digital map data and paper maps for business, leisure, educational, and administrative use.

The public-sector agency operates as a Trading Fund, with an annual turnover of around £100 million. However, an independent survey has indicated that Ordnance Survey data already underpins around £100 billion of economic activity across both the public and private sectors. The agency is currently implementing an ambitious e-strategy to further enhance its services to customers and help grow the business.

Ordnance Survey licenses organizations to use its data. Organizations like local and central government and utilities (Scottish Power) normally have a service-level agreement with OS and regularly receive updates of data at various scales for their areas of interest. To this end, ESRI (UK) Ltd. produces a product called Productivity Suite, which converts OS data into ESRI systems.

The approach of having a multiple database instance environment with both edit (transactional) and product databases is of interest to other organizations with large datasets.

Learn more about Ordnance Survey products and services.

In July 2002, ESRI (UK) Ltd. and Tadpole Technology Group (now TC Technology) were selected by Ordnance Survey to build its next-generation field editing and data management system. Known as the Field Object Editor, this state-of-the-art solution will be used by Ordnance Survey's 400-plus survey staff to maintain and update the national large-scale dataset, OS MasterMap. This is a 400-gigabyte dataset containing over 400 million features.

TC Technology's Field GIS software, in conjunction with Tadpole Endeavors' Magi software, delivers the client component of the system, enabling field-based Ordnance Survey staff to carry out their tasks on pen computers. Field GIS is based on ESRI's ArcGIS and Survey Analyst products, with the interface supporting both gesture and voice input. For data management, ESRI ArcEditor software's functionally rich editing clients and ArcSDE software's spatial database engine will be used, with all data stored in an Oracle9i Spatial database.

"Ordnance Survey's next-generation data capture system is possibly the most advanced and sophisticated large-scale mapping project ever undertaken by any national mapping organization anywhere in the world," comments Ed Parsons, Ordnance Survey's chief technology officer.

In January 2003, Ordnance Survey and ESRI (UK) Ltd. signed a strategic partnership agreement to facilitate the enterprise-wide deployment of ESRI technology. Ordnance Survey's vision is to deploy common underlying technologies that are flexible, scalable, and open.

The spirit of the agreement is a cooperative and unifying one, allowing partnership development and promotion of spatial applications and datasets. The agreement provides Ordnance Survey with advanced access to ESRI software by participation in beta programs, collaborative research and development projects, and joint marketing activities.

Contact: James McLoughlin, Senior Marketing Manager, ESRI (UK) Ltd.
Telephone: +44-1296-745500
E-mail: jmcloughlin@esriuk.com