RED January at OS
Inspired by the life-changing effect that a physical challenge had on her mum’s mental health, Hannah Beecham founded RED January to help people boost their own mental and physical health. From humble beginnings in 2015 comes a growing community of 60,000 REDers who are not just running but taking part in a multitude of different ways.
Exclusively partnering with leading mental health charity, Mind, in 2017, Hannah has deservedly experienced amazing success with RED January and we couldn’t be happier being a part of it.
Alongside Solent Mind being our corporate charity back in 2017, our product manager Egbe Manners took part in RED January by herself. Being part of the running club at OS, others soon got on board for the next one. Three years on, we have over 60 OS employees taking part in this year’s RED January!
GB’s longest linear walk without crossing a road
Here at OS, we get asked some curiously specific questions by our Twitter followers. Our teams are always up for a challenge and, as this query required map exploration, who better to ask than our amazing Consultation and Technical Services (CaTS) team? Please see the query embedded below.
@OrdnanceSurvey Hello! An enquiry if I may…..what (and where) is the longest distance you can walk in a straight line in England/Wales/Scotland without crossing a road (defined as a paved surface for vehicular use)?? Planning a potential expedition. Ta!
— Roger Dalton (@100in7) November 15, 2018
Now, not only were our CaTS team able to identify the longest distance in Great Britain you can walk in a straight line without crossing a road (which consequently you may have read about in some newspaper articles), but as this was in Scotland, the team also decided to find the longest in both England and Wales too.
Our role in the RUGGEDISED project
Glasgow City Council, as part of its EU Horizon 2020 Smart Cities and Communities funded project RUGGEDISED (Rotterdam, Umea, Glasgow: Generating Exemplar Demonstrations in Sustainable Energy Districts), is, in tandem with developing various smart and sustainable energy measures, developing a Data-Based Decision Platform (DBDP). The DBDP will be a window into the various datasets generated throughout the project, as well as internal and external datasets utilised by Glasgow City Council. The DBDP will analyse and interpret various datasets to inform policy and strategy decisions in relation to city operations in the city, providing outputs that will inform operational actions.
Screenshot of DBDP.
Geospatial data events with RGS
As the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) is the UK’s learned society and professional body for geography, we’re sure it won’t shock you to know we often work together on exciting (and of course!) geography-related projects.
Miranda Sharp, OS Director of Innovation.
This year, we have combined our expertise and arranged several events to help promote and advance understanding of the uses of geospatial data.
On Monday 14 January, Miranda Sharp, our Director of Innovation, will explore how powerful information about location can be used to build a system of smarter infrastructure to help the UK economy and society to thrive in our lecture ‘Creating a master map of the UK: a route to a better future?’.
Additionally, as part of the RGS regional lecture series, on Tuesday 15 January, our Chief Geospatial Scientist Jeremy Morley will join neuroscientist Professor Kate Jeffrey in Southampton to discuss how our day to day navigation abilities can be linked to recent research on how the brain represents details of places.
12 Days of Christmas
In anticipation of Christmas, we thought we would pay homage to the classic seasonal track 12 Days of Christmas by finding some fun OS facts about Great Britain for each line.
To avoid typing the whole song out as we know you know it already, we have just written the last paragraph here to jog your memory.
On the twelfth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:
12 Drummers Drumming
11 Pipers Piping
10 Lords a Leaping
9 Ladies Dancing
8 Maids a Milking
7 Swans a Swimming
6 Geese a Laying
5 Golden Rings
4 Calling Birds
3 French Hens
2 Turtle Doves
and a Partridge in a Pear Tree
Within Great Britain, there are 12 roads in total with the term ‘drum’, ‘drumming’ or ‘drummers’. While Drummer Lane occurs twice, Drummer’s Lane and the other 9 such as Drummermire and Drummery Lane are unique.
AddressBase – 7 years of improving public sector services, deliveries and service provision
As Christmas draws closer, nights lengthen and temperatures drop, many people will be doing their Christmas shopping, mince pie baking and Christmas card writing. This is also one of the busiest times of year for many businesses. Utility companies need to ensure people remain warm, online shopping delivery companies are frantically getting Christmas presents delivered on time, and the financial sector is processing and validating purchases.
This is all of course not forgetting Santa and his elves getting ready for the all-important night of December 24th. Most of the time as members of the public we can simply sit back and enjoy some festive treats why this all happens seamlessly without us even thinking about it.
We might venture out into the ever increasingly bracing weather for the traditional family walks possibly using one of our OS paper maps, something our brand is most known for. These maps are what made OS famous, but analytical data products are now how OS supports ever increasing numbers of businesses delivering these vital services to you over Christmas, and throughout the rest of the year.
Glasgow 2018 European Championships and OS data
During August 2018 the cities of Glasgow (UK) and Berlin (DE) jointly-hosted the inaugural edition of the European Championships, a new and exciting multi-sport event. The Glasgow 2018 European Championships brought together some of our continent’s leading athletes. The city of Glasgow and Scotland hosted aquatics, cycling, golf, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon with athletics and the marathon being hosted in Berlin. In total, there were 11 competition days, 12 sports venues and 188 medal events. More than 3,000 athletes travelled to Scotland while 1,500 athletes competed in Berlin.
Combining the power of ESRI’s ArcGIS Online platform technology with highly detailed geospatial data from OS, Glasgow City Council created web mapping applications for planning and operational purposes prior to and throughout the event.
The use of web mapping applications was vital in assisting with the planning, staffing and operational elements of the venues and cycling routes, particularly the events which involved public roads.
Games Time: Time Trial Sector Road Closures.
OS hospital bay taking shape
7 months ago we announced Southampton Children’s Hospital Charity as our corporate charity. We’ve been busy raising money and so far, our total is £8,943.03!
As well as our #charitytuesday events, cake sales and football sweepstakes (mentioned in our previous blog), we have had a few big events which have considerably contributed to our total that we’d like to shout about.
Off the Scale’s 2018 annual gala at HQ.
Tutorial – visualising data in Tableau with the RNLI
So far, we have looked at visualising Royal National Lifeboat Institute and Ordnance Survey data using QGIS and Kepler software. In this, our third technical blog, we will be using Tableau.
Tableau is a data visualisation software that is used for creating a wide range of different visualisation to interactively present data and obtain insights. It has a very intuitive user interface and you don’t need any coding knowledge to work with it. For this tutorial we will be using Tableau Public which can be downloaded here.
We will be creating a spider map or origin-destination map that shows paths between our origins (RNLI stations) and destinations (call-outs). All the data you will need for this tutorial can be found here.
Within this data folder there is a CSV file called tableau_finished which was created using a combination of the RNLI_Return_of_Service_20082006.csv and RNLI_Lifeboat_Station_Locations.csv.
Meet the team: Lisa Allen
Continuing our series to introduce you to the amazing individuals within OS and showcase the variety of work we do, meet Lisa Allen. While Lisa is relatively new to OS, she has already made her mark. Here, she gives us an insight into her role in the OS Data Office and how she gives our data a voice…
How long have you worked for OS?
I am a newcomer to OS as I started in April this year. Before I joined I worked across Government on projects such as the Defra Open Data challenge and preparation for the Data Protection Act 2018.
What is your role?
I am the Head of Data Management and Requirements. Being part of the new data office and working for OS’s first Chief Data Officer Caroline Bellamy was an exciting prospect I could not turn down!
