We are taking several important steps towards an enhanced data capture, management and supply process focused on the needs of our customers and partners. Pressing ahead with plans for an integrated IT architecture and data model will enable seamless data collection, storage and management to address the growing demand for location information. The new system will manage a greater volume of data while enabling more efficient collection, boosting the potential for new products while ensuring currency and consistency between all existing datasets. We are completing a comprehensive six-year programme of positional accuracy improvement (PAI) affecting around 155,000 square kilometres of Great Britain. The programme was prompted by advances in surveying technology that made it difficult to align higher-accuracy work to rural mapping previously surveyed at 1:2 500 scale. PAI, which has involved extensive customer contact, is a vital underlying element in ensuring our product portfolio remains interoperable.

The last year has seen a large increase in the numbers of customers and partners moving from dependency on older large-scale products to OS MasterMap, our latest generation of data surveyed at 1:1250. In so doing, customer and partners gain the scope to use structured, intelligent and well maintained geographic data as a fully integrated business database.

Enhancements soon to be incorporated into our most highly detailed address data – OS MasterMap Address Layer - will add 1.3 million buildings to the spatial dataset. Address Layer 2 will include a geographic alternative such as the locality or district name and alias details, such as the name of the property as well as its number and street. Previously “non-addressable” properties - those without letterboxes such as utilities plant, community halls, churches and public conveniences - will prove vital references for emergency response, civil contingency planning, risk assessment, asset insurance, planning, customer services and asset maintenance. Each building will be classified as “residential” or “commercial”, and a cross-reference table will link our data with that of other key address providers.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000 came into law in Great Britain in January 2005. It gives the right to any person making a request of a public authority (including Ordnance Survey) to be told whether it has the information they are interested in and to have that information given to them. The aim is to ensure there is openness and public accountability in government activity, balanced with the need to protect legitimate confidential information. Since the Act came into operation, Ordnance Survey has responded to almost 200 requests from individuals and organisations. Government analysis has consistently found our response rate to meet or approach 100% within the standard statutory deadline of 20 days.

However, I want to make it clear that prior to the FOIA, we already had an established customer contact centre handling in excess of 2,500 enquiries per month, demonstrating our commitment to operating within the spirit of the legislation even before it came into force.

The National GPS Network is an infrastructure of active and passive Global Positioning System (GPS) reference stations enabling surveyors to determine precise coordinates in GPS and British National Grid spatial reference systems. Over recent years, considerable progress has been made in enabling the use of GPS technology within the National Grid by defining published coordinate transformations, most recently OSTN02.

In December 2005 we launched OS Net, a publicly available GPS correction network, enabling up to centimetre-accuracy data collection and a range of positioning services both in real time and for postprocess
applications. This 90- strong base station network is the country’s most comprehensive highaccuracy positioning framework and has already delivered significant efficiency improvements for our 285 field surveyors.

The network has been trialled by major utility companies, and partners can add their technical and commercial expertise to develop positioning applications tailored to their customers’ requirements. This means utilities, construction companies and other users of high-level positioning
services no longer have to set out their own base station network to use
centimetre- or decimetre-level GPS. Potential benefits include cost savings in hardware, set-up and maintenance for industries including construction, land survey and agriculture.

The GPS website (www.gps.gov. uk) provides a coordinate converter to transform horizontal and vertical coordinates to ETRS89 (GPS) coordinates and vice-versa. The precise transformations can be downloaded free of charge and incorporated into third-party software packages. The website also gives access to a database of passive stations with precisely measured GPS coordinates and there is a facility to download data from active GPS stations for post-processing user data to improve the level of precision.

The GPS correction network has boosted the amount of free raw data available on the website by 90% for GPS users including civil engineers and surveyors, asset managers, engineers and academics.

Data from individual OS Net stations is fed to the website directly from one central server held at our head office rather than from each one individually. This has speeded and streamlined the delivery of realtime data to customers, safeguarding accuracy through direct data flow.

As Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey operates as a public sector trading fund which means we are financed through data licensing rather than direct funding from the tax-payer. The aim is to provide a sharper focus on achieving value for money and providing key services and supplies more effectively. Last year we returned a trading revenue of £100.4 million. We receive more than half of our trading revenue from the private sector and work alongside partners and customers to develop and deliver our products and services.

Our geographic information underpins an array of tasks such as performance analysis, asset management, consumer profiling, routing and supply chain management. The accessibility and flexibility of our digital data presents new and exciting possibilities for customers and partners and can help inform policy and planning, deliver improved services, join up dispar datasets and boost process efficiencies.

Awareness and use of location information is growing rapidly across the private sector, with GI underpinning a growing number of services and processes across many markets. We collaborate with a wide range of partners and developers who evolve products and services based on our GI. System suppliers develop data-enabling tools, software and services to enable the management and integration of our data.

You have to understand that Ordnance Survey information underpins £100 billion of economic activity in Great Britain every year. That is about 8% of GDP. It is used in a vast range of applications from educational provision to emergency services. To restrict this information would have a great impact on our economy. The issue is to make sure that all our data is licensed to end users. We will continue to highlight the benefits of GI as location data moves further into the mainstream. As this information is being handled by an increasing number of people with less specialist GIS knowledge, systems will become easier to use. Like any other data business, we are well aware of the balance to be struck between providing data for the legitimate user of information and protecting society from perceived threats. Our view is that the potential for misuse is overwhelmingly outweighed by the tremendous benefits that our data brings to society.

Our Mapping for Emergencies scheme supplies paper map products and GI to national organisations and emergency services to support their response to major civil crises. In the immediate aftermath of the London bombings, we worked alongside other government agencies to produce a range of wall maps, flyers and handouts incorporating London Transport data. In the weeks that followed, we supplied a number of organisations with full national coverage of requested data products to inform their contingency planning.