Welcome to Ordnance Survey Research

Welcome to the Research information pages. Please visit these pages to learn more about who we are and what we do.

Research Annual Review Published

In a rapidly changing technological environment, what does the future hold for Ordnance Survey and its stakeholders? How will Geographic Information be captured, managed, traded and used, now and in the future?

Ordnance Survey's Research teams are using a combination of research, innovation, creativity, design, prototyping and imagination to meet the challenges the future poses.

The Research Annual Review records our progress over the last year and can be downloaded here:

Research Labs Annual Review 2006-7 (PDF 5.1 MB)

Our role

Our purpose is to ensure successful futures for Ordnance Survey, its partners and the nation as a whole. We aim to project an image of Ordnance Survey as a forward looking organisation, prepared to set and influence the direction of the information industry through the development of products and services based on geography. We are here to actively advance Ordnance Survey's success into a wide and diverse partner network and to ensure that the United Kingdom remains at the forefront of geographic information (GI) development and exploitation.

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.

Research programme

Our research is currently structured and carried out by six research teams:

GeoUsers: understanding user needs: Attempts to anticipate users' future requirements for GI and the manner in which the information is presented to the user. Whereas other teams specialise (though not exclusively) around particular goals, GeoUsers address the user aspects of all goals.
Terrestrial based data capture: This team performs research centred around improving ground survey methods and expanding the range of electronic data sources that are exploited by Ordnance Survey. Current research is concentrating on the use of augmented reality and pointing devices to aid field surveyors.
Remote sensing: Research in this area attempts to both drive down the cost of data capture and to enable new types of data to be captured. Much existing research here is concentrating on more efficient methods of change detection; the efficient and flexible extraction of height and 3-D data; and machine assistance for the photogrammetric surveyor and the establishment of a photogrammetric toolset based around a multi-agent architecture.
Data modelling, visualisation & interaction: This team develops new models to represent existing and new spatial data in ways that enable better and more efficient storage, retrieval and manipulation of the data. It then uses such models to create working prototypes, showing how this data may be visualised, used and exploited. Current work is concentrating on spatio-temporal data, gazetteers, 3-D, and fuzzy and uncertain features.
Generalisation: This team is concentrating on the derivation of mid- and small-scale maps from OS MasterMap®. Here significant progress has been made at 1:50 000 scale and in developing a toolset and agent-based architecture.
GeoSemantics: Research into ways of representing the meaning of Ordnance Survey's data and geographical knowledge using machine-readable descriptions known as ontologies, based on semantic web technology. This helps us to efficiently combine multiple data sources based on their meaning, as well as describe our data in customers' own terminology.

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