Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey® is Great Britain's national mapping agency, with headquarters located in Southampton, England. It is responsible for creating and updating the mapping for the entire country, from which it produces and markets a wide range of digital map data and paper maps for business, leisure, educational and administrative use. Ordnance Survey operates as a government Trading Fund with an annual turnover of around £100 million. An independent survey has indicated that Ordnance Survey data underpins around £100 billion of economic activity across both the public and private sectors. Ordnance Survey is currently implementing an ambitious e-strategy to enhance still further its services to customers and help grow the business.

Ordnance Survey started to make significant use of ESRI products in 2001, following the selection of the ESRI product stack to provide a single technology platform for the deployment of a variety of Intranet, Internet and desktop applications.

Many organisations, such as local government authorities, central government agencies and utility companies, have agreements with Ordnance Survey for the supply and licensed use of data and regularly receive updates of data at various scales for their area of interest. To this end ESRI UK produce a product called Map Manager, which converts Ordnance Survey data into ESRI systems.

The approach to having a multiple database instance environment with both edit (transactional) and product databases is of interest to other organisations with large datasets.

In July 2002 ESRI (UK) and Tadpole Technology Group [now TC Technology] were selected by Ordnance Survey to build its next generation field editing and data management system. Known as the Field Object Editor, this state-of-the-art solution will be used by the national mapping agency’s surveyors to maintain and update the national large scale dataset, OS MasterMap®. This is a 400 gigabyte dataset that contains over 400 million features.

TC Technology's Field GIS software, in conjunction with Tadpole® Endeavors Magi software, delivers the client component of the system, enabling field-based Ordnance Survey staff to carry out their tasks on pen computers. Field GIS is based upon ESRI's ArcGIS and Survey Analyst products with the interface supporting both gesture and voice input. For data management, ESRI's ArcEditor functionally-rich editing clients and ArcSDE spatial database engine will be used, with all data stored in an Oracle® 9i Spatial database.

‘Ordnance Survey's next generation data capture system is possibly the most advanced and sophisticated large-scale mapping project ever undertaken by any national mapping organisation anywhere in the world,’ comments Ed Parsons, Ordnance Survey's Chief Technology Officer and Director of IS.

In January 2003 Ordnance Survey and ESRI (UK) signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement to facilitate the enterprise-wide deployment of ESRI technology. Ordnance Survey’s vision is to deploy common underlying technologies that are flexible, scalable and open.

The spirit of the agreement is a cooperative and unifying one, allowing partnership development and promotion of spatial applications and datasets. The Agreement provides Ordnance Survey with advanced access to ESRI software by participation in beta programmes, collaborative research and development projects, and joint marketing activities.

Contact: Roy Laming, Marketing Director, ESRI (UK)
Telephone: +44 1296 745500
E-mail: rlaming@esriuk.com

For more information on Ordnance Survey products and services, visit its web site at http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business