Points of Interest

Understanding more detail about your commercial and landscape environment

Points of Interest is a dataset of around 3.9 million geographic and commercial features across Great Britain - all highlighting location and function information, (classified into more than 600 individual classifications from more than 150 different suppliers) and with a postal address for all postally addressable Points.

Points of Interest has a highly developed three-level classification system to help you identify the features you are interested in. Points are classified into 9 broad Groups, 49 subject categories and then around 615 highly specific Classes. This might be anything from accommodation (for a business traveller or tourist) through landscape features (for planning uses or the emergency services) to transport links (from rail and air to bus and tram users). Points of Interest includes POIs with a postal address (eg banks, hotels and restaurants) and those without (eg lakes, electricity sub stations and golf courses).

Each Points of Interest feature is provided with a national grid coordinate so it can be visualised as a point on a digital mapping system. When Points of Interest is combined with mapping, it becomes a powerful component in a modern, detailed location-based application.The product is updated every three months to all customers

How Points of Interest can be used

The primary use of points of interest is to allow identification of different facilities or resources within the built and natural environment.
The data can be used within a table format, such as a spreadsheet or a database to create gazetteer or list type applications that allow people to search for a particular facility or resource.

To extract the fullest possible value from the data, it is best viewed and analysed within a Geographic Information System that can use the coordinates to display each feature's geographic location as a point in combination with a topographic map. This enables uses such as calculating the distance between different banks to judge how far apart they actually are or from a position supplied by the customer. This could be a feature such as a car park or a train station, or a coordinate supplied from a mobile phone.

The customer could also input a geographic area, such as an electoral ward, within

which the GIS could return a list of all the banks that fall within that boundary.

Points of Interest data can be used with other Ordnance survey products and a customer's own data. Using it with OS MasterMap Address Layers enables a customer to find out where an address is located and Points of Interest is used to find out what activity takes place at the location.  For example, if an insurance company received a claim concerning an activity at a certain address, it could use both products to do an initial evaluation of the claim. Using OS MasterMap Address Layers they can identify the premise. It would be possible, using Points of Interest, to see if the alleged activity does take place there. If there is a match, the claim might still need further checking, but being able to do a certain number of verification or logic checks at the desktop may result in more efficient and faster processing. Points of Interest could also provide telephone numbers and area context information.

Points of Interest

Points of Interest leaflet

Product Presentation

Using Points of Interest to provide an up-to-date picture of land use

For more information or a consultation, please contact General Enquiries Helpdesk