GIS Files 3: Adding real-world information

3.5: Structured GIS data is the key (2)

Address data

Ordnance Survey produces data products that have their origins in the accurate large-scale archive but which are tailored for use in GIS. The simplest is ADDRESS-POINT®, whereby the building seeds from Land-Line® have been matched with the Royal Mail Postal Address File (the UK authority on addresses). This has created a basic point dataset where the location is stored as a pair of National Grid coordinates along with the address attributes, like house number, street name and postcode. This data is as far removed from a conventional paper map as can be imagined.

On its own, ADDRESS-POINT has no capacity for visual interpretation as a map. It is purely a resource to enable address-based information sources to be loaded into a GIS for analysis.

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