Opening up OS MasterMap data

Unlocking of government’s mapping and location data to boost economy by £130m a year

The OS Open MasterMap Implementation Programme helped shape access and sharing arrangements for OS MasterMap.

Improving access to OS geospatial data

Making key parts of the Ordnance Survey (OS) MasterMap freely available is helping businesses and organisations use geospatial data more easily and drive innovation across the UK economy.

The PSGA delivers the government's June 2018 commitments to improve access to OS core geospatial data, and release core identifiers under OGL.

  • Explore OS products

    Discover OS geospatial data download products, API products, and geospatial services, and find out how they can benefit your organisation.

  • Visit the OS Data Hub

    With over 20,000 updates to our databases every day, you have access to a comprehensive and up-to-date set of authoritative data through the OS Data Hub.

  • Discover authoritative property extents data

    As part of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreements (PSGA), OS is providing new freedoms to share data.

  • Read our Open Identifiers Policy

    Our Open Identifiers (ID) policy makes it easier for third parties to share information and link datasets.

Listening to our users

To make sure the products and services we have been developing satisfied user requirements, we worked closely with a Customer Advisory Group. This was a mix of public and private sector organisations. Members of the advisory group brought their industry expertise to provide feedback from many different perspectives. We also carried out trials with over 1,500 users throughout the Programme.

We intend to use the lessons learned from our engagement with the Customer Advisory Group to shape how the PSGA delivers value for our customers. Listening to our customers is key to our ongoing improvement.

How the engagement helped us deliver value

We achieved the goals of the project, which were:

Significantly more geospatial data fully open for businesses and developers to use, free and without restriction

  • We published an OS Open TOID dataset, with a generalised XY coordinate, for all buildings, structures, land cover and transport infrastructure.
  • We published a list of all UPRNs with their XY coordinates, OS Open UPRN.
  • We published OS Open USRN with simplified line geometry.
  • We extended the type of derived data licensees will be able to publish under open terms.
  • Our Open ID policy enables and encourages the use of our identifiers to join datasets and combine the value of our data with the value of yours.

Established businesses and start-ups can deliver new products and services with the data using the free threshold

Some businesses will not need to pay at all for their use of OS data because of the free threshold.

  • You can use premium data up to the royalty-free threshold of £1,000 per calendar month, or in development mode.
  • The £1,000 worth of free transactions each month with give you access to our most detailed dataset OS MasterMap, as well as our renowned 1:25 000 and 1:50 000 datasets – with each being available to anyone to use for developing apps, products and services for use by 3rd parties, including the public – using either OS’s APIs or their own APIs.
  • You may not need to pay at all for your use of OS data if your monthly usage falls below the £1,000 free threshold.
  • Three APIs will use this free threshold: OS Maps API, OS Vector Tile API and OS Features API.
  • Unlimited, free access to OS OpenData via APIs for anyone to use for any purpose.

New innovations are now possible in the housing market

The use of the identifiers released under the PSGA to join a range of currently published government data, with the potential new datasets that will be released as a result of the changes to the derived data and Open ID policies could lead to identification of sites suitable for building new homes.

New users can understand the pricing structure for the data more easily, removing uncertainty around cost of use

We've designed straightforward pricing plans tailored to meet the needs of customers.

Publish data in new ways to improve the quality of the data and make it easier to use

We developed and launched OS Open Zoomstack and improved the format for nine of our OpenData products. They're available in Geopackage format, an open standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Going forward we'll be releasing our premium datasets in new formats, making them even easier to use.

Getting different parts of OS data to work together better with open identifiers

We launched an OS Open Linked Identifiers dataset as OS OpenData and an OS Linked Identifiers API.

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