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Points of Interest frequently asked questions (ordering)

How is the data supplied?

The data comes in an industry-standard ASCII ‘Pipe’ delimited file format on CD or DVD. The size of the compressed data file for Great Britain is approximately 230 Mb.

What media is my order created on?

Points of Interest is supplied on either CD or DVD. The current size of national coverage is 230 Mb (compressed) or 950 Mb (uncompressed). A full supply will fit on a single DVD. If at some future point the dataset exceeds the capacity of a CD, DVD will become the preferred media.

If I order Points of Interest, do I have to take all of Great Britain?

Customers can choose from a menu of geographic areas, including England, Scotland, Wales, or from the Government Office Regions (also known as Regional Development Areas and European electoral regions). Smaller administrative areas that is, county/unitary authority and district are also available. Further information on ordering Points of Interest is available in the user guide.

Can I order areas by Tiles?

Customers can define their own areas by supplying either:

A list of National Grid 1 km tiles.
The South West and North East co-ordinates of a bounding box.
An irregular shape created in a GIS in a MIF file.
Or contact Ordnance Survey for further information about order options.

Will the data be updated regularly?

Yes. Points of Interest is a 'maintained' dataset and all customers receive a quarterly update to their licensed data holding.

What are the additional files on my data disk?

In addition to a copyright file and the data itself, the disk you receive as you order contains four more files that contain important information on the attributes of the Points of Interest features.

Classification look-up file

The look-up file provides the descriptions, or values, associated with the classification code attribute. This is the file you need to find out what activity or service relates to any particular code. The values can be found in a file called classification_lookups.txt on the data disk. A couple of entries from the file are shown below:

“01010002” | “Camping, caravanning, mobile homes, holiday parks and centres”

“01010003”| “Guest houses and bed and breakfast”

Positional accuracy look-up file

The look-up file provides the descriptions, or values, associated with the positional accuracy code attribute. On the data disk the look-up file is called postional_accuracy_lookups.txt. The values are shown below:

1|"Positioned to the address or location"

2|"Positioned to an adjacent address or location"

3|"Positioned to the road within the address or location"

4|"Positioned within the geographical locality"

For further information on using the positional accuracy file, please see the user guide

Keyword search file

Customer feedback has indicated that users of Points of Interest data would benefit from having access to additional documentation that showed both where within the classification system certain features are held and, additionally, uses strings or keywords compatible with systems already in place to do this. As an initial step for linking up with existing systems, the keyword list terms held in the Local Government Business Category List (LGBCL) version 1.00 have so far been classified and provided in the Keywords.txt file. An extract from the keyword search file is given below:

Books|||||674|599||||

Bowling alleys|||||290|||||

Bowls clubs|||||290|||||

Bread and flour||47|||528|524||||

Brewery|||||522|||||

There is also supporting documentation in the form of the file Keywords Documentation.pdf. This explains how to use the keyword file and provides an example of how to read the relevant group, category or class from the table. More information on the LGBCL, including a downloadable copy of the list, can be found on its website.

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For general enquiries, complaints, feedback or suggestions, email: customerservices@ordnancesurvey.co.uk or call us on 08456 05 05 05