04 June 2007

Ordnance Survey customers move ahead on OS MasterMap journey

Ordnance Survey today takes an important step forward in the development of Great Britain’s most highly detailed geographic information.

With increasing numbers of customers seeing benefits from the intelligent database product OS MasterMap, the trend away from the previous Land-Line mapping has intensified.

As a result, Ordnance Survey is announcing to customers and technology partners the withdrawal of Land-Line on 30 September, 2008 – exactly 16 months from now.   

The decision follows a public consultation designed to explore the impact of product migration in market sectors such as local government, utilities and land and property.

The feedback reflected growing recognition of the benefits of moving to OS MasterMap such as easier data association, faster updates, seamless coverage and cost efficiencies in data acquisition and management.

“Today’s announcement means we can focus more strongly on continued investment in OS MasterMap and the delivery of definitive, intelligent and accessible digital data to our customers,” says Peter ter Haar, Ordnance Survey’s Director of Products. “Since its launch in November 2001, the OS MasterMap Topography Layer has been successfully adopted by many different customer groups. It provides many benefits over Land-Line, particularly in terms of its increased data richness, comprising features that correspond to real-world objects, and also its superior digital cartography.”

OS MasterMap Topography Layer now supports a huge variety of applications such as asset management, emergency planning, policy-based planning, customer services, education and health provision, environmental monitoring and transport. It offers significant improvements for the communication of geographically-referenced information. 

Since it is an intelligent data product, where each feature has a unique numeric identifier or TOID, customers can associate it with their own data. As a result, OS MasterMap is increasingly being managed as a fully integrated database underpinning geographic information systems across Great Britain. This offers real benefits to customers through cost and efficiency savings and more powerful data analysis to support their decision-making. More than 1,000 public sector and utility customers have moved from legacy products to OS MasterMap in the past year. 

OS MasterMap is also helping to support the Digital National Framework (DNF), a collaborative initiative between members of the private and public sectors to provide a model for data sharing through consistent and readily available formats. DNF offers the ability to link multiple information sources to a definitive location, reducing the amount of data duplication and the cost of gathering data by enabling a ‘create once, use many times’ model. 

DNF principles already support vital work on recording and storing information on the location of pipes, cables and other buried infrastructure. A growing number of local authorities are using DNF ideas to create and share information from their local street gazetteers to help with freight plans and other traffic management issues.

Land-Line (and Land-Line Plus) will continue to be supported and licensed until 30 September 2008. The final Land-Line update will be supplied to customers, as determined by their normal schedule, up until that date.

In the public consultation, held between May and September 2005, a third of respondents said they would continue to require access to their own archive of Land-Line after withdrawal. Therefore, on 1 October 2008, Ordnance Survey will make licences available giving customers that continued access should they wish.

Ordnance Survey’s account management team is available to help Land-Line customers through the withdrawal process, while its Pre and Post Sales Support team will provide technical support in adopting OS MasterMap Topography Layer.

END

Notes for editors:

1     Ordnance Survey is Great Britain’s national mapping agency, providing the most accurate and up-to-date geographic data, relied on by government, business and the public.

2     Download this news release at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/media

3     Ordnance Survey and the OS Symbol are registered trademarks of Ordnance Survey.

 

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Head of Corporate Communications - Rob Andrews

Email: rob.andrews@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

Phone: (+44) 023 8079 2265

Senior Communications & PR Officer - Paul Beauchamp

Email: paul.beauchamp@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

Phone: (+44) 023 8079 2568

Press Office fax: (+44) 023 8030 5295