28 June 2007

Ordnance Survey improves rural mapping programme

An improved programme to update the most detailed mapping of rural Britain has been announced by Ordnance Survey today.

Among those to benefit will be hundreds of government departments, local authorities and other organisations with an interest in change on the landscape.

Physical changes across more than 220,000 km² of rural, mountain and moorland landscapes will be collected in line with currency levels based on new, more integrated ways of working already under way in urban areas.

The move reflects the development of data‑capture processes increasingly driven by change intelligence and informed by, for example, population density, plans for new housing and roads, and other sources of statistics.

The programme follows the successful completion of a six‑year nationwide initiative to align the absolute accuracy of previously surveyed mapping data in rural areas with today’s GPS technology. Ordnance Survey has also developed a national network of more than 100 GPS base stations, which are helping to deliver substantial efficiency gains in data collection. These support Ordnance Survey’s ongoing target to survey all significant features within six months of completion. In practice, many are captured much faster than that.

The key aim of the new programme is to improve a process called “cyclic revision” in rural areas. This has traditionally involved systematic aerial photography “sweeps” at intervals of either five or ten years. The scheduling of sweeps will now move away from a purely cyclic basis to one led chiefly by intelligence on landscape change.

Under the new programme:

• All primary features, such as residential, industrial and transport infrastructure developments, will continue to be surveyed within six months of completion.
• A varying 2–10‑year programme of cyclic rural revision will maintain all secondary features such as field boundary changes and small non‑residential buildings.
• All areas of Great Britain will be revised in a more integrated programme – populated or rapidly changing rural areas will be revised more frequently than previously, with remote areas still being revised at least once every ten years. Revision intervals may vary according to patterns of known change and customer need.

The programme will ensure that the most relevant methods are used to collect information about specific types of features in different areas. 

The overall result will be that many areas are revised as or more frequently than before, with those areas experiencing most change being revised every two years. A small number of areas, where there is a lack of change to secondary features, will be revised less frequently. However, even in those areas continuous revision through ground‑survey collection processes will ensure that significant change such as new buildings and roads will still be captured within the six‑month target as now. 

“As the national mapping agency, we are constantly striving to improve the quality, currency and content of geographic information across the whole of Great Britain,” says Neil Ackroyd, Ordnance Survey’s Director of Data Collection and Management. “Our investment in new, integrated processes and technology means we now have more sources of intelligence about where and when change will occur in the landscape. This information allows us to meet customer need more effectively through better targeting of both aerial photography and ground survey.

“We have reviewed our programme in the light of changing customer needs, technological processes and an altered funding situation. We are confident that the efficiencies built into our new approach will deliver an overall improvement in currency and content of rural geography in our products and substantially mitigate the impact of the withdrawal of the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement.”

The new approach is another in a line of improvements being made to support Ordnance Survey’s large‑scale OS MasterMap product family. For more information visit www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/osmastermap.

 

Notes for editors

Some of the costs of rural mapping, including positional accuracy improvements, were previously supported through the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) between Ordnance Survey and Communities and Local Government, which came to an end in December 2006. At that time Ordnance Survey indicated that the loss of NIMSA would have an impact on the currency and content of rural geography within its products and might also result in the lengthening of rural revision sweep cycles – if it continued with its programme unchanged.

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Head of Corporate Communications - Rob Andrews

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