Ordnance Survey Research: About us

Creating future value for Ordnance Survey

Who we are

An eclectic, multinational mix of thirty or so academics, commercially weathered irregulars and bright young things form Research within Ordnance Survey. Our skills and expertise range from the predictable - geography, surveying, remote sensing and computer science - to the less expected, such as cognitive science, and the puzzling: time travel.

What we do

Research conducts a balanced portfolio of long and short term, largely applied, high and low risk research. Our research direction is determined by three goals:

To introduce automated, near real-time capture to database processes.
To introduce a flexible, multidimensional, information-rich database and the means by which Ordnance Survey products and services are derived.
To introduce semantic reference systems, enabling GI to be automatically understood, exchanged and integrated.

We hope the first two are more or less self explanatory, the last will ensure that Ordnance Survey remains in the forefront of the information industry by enabling machines to process Ordnance Survey information with little or no intervention by people.

How we do it

Whilst a research group of thirty is not insignificant, it is modest when compared to the size of the challenges we have. We have therefore adopted a strategy of achieving as much research as we can through collaborations. The form such partnerships take varies enormously and includes:

expert networks;
contracted research;
PhD and MSc funding;
joint initiatives with other government agencies, research bodies and commercial organisations; and
collaborative research undertaken with partners.

Research Publications

We actively encourage our research staff to publish their research in journals and conference proceedings. As we have retained the copyright in these publications we are able to place them on-line for oyou to download for personal and research related use, but we do ask that you not to directly exploit them for commercial purposes. The publications are organised along the lines of our research topics above but we've also included a section entitled 'Technology' and the inevitable 'Miscellaneous'.
Read our research publications

Who to contact

We welcome opportunities to increase our network of collaborations where no project is too big or too small. If anything here seems in anyway relevant to the work you are conducting, please contact us on:

researchenquiries@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

For all other enquiries, complaints, feedback or suggestions, please contact us.