What does connectivity actually connect? This isn’t a riddle or trick question, but a key to better understanding how today’s world functions.
You may instantly associate connectivity with the digital world – enabling people to work together remotely or share things on social media. But digital technology also enables physical connections, such as transport links, delivery apps, public services and the pipes and cables that deliver energy and utilities. These types of connectivity have become fundamental to our everyday lives – and they are all underpinned by accurate location data.
“In a typical day, there are 42 occasions when individuals use a service or a piece of infrastructure that relies on Ordnance Survey data,” says Ash Wheeler, who works with location data in his role as director of propositions and markets for Ordnance Survey (OS), Britain’s national mapping service. “Infrastructure underpins how any nation is able to function, and improves the quality of life for the people who live there. And we underpin infrastructure: OS location data and data services both map and enable the operation of the many infrastructure networks that support the way Great Britain operates.”
The location data that OS produces and maintains has become so pervasive that it underpins everyday services such as waste collection, water provision, deliveries and insurance premiums. And it feeds into essential emergency services, such as the dispatch systems used by ambulances. It can also help organisations monitor damage to the physical landscape as part of wider global efforts to tackle environmental emergencies.
Wheeler and his team at OS are continually working on innovative new uses for location data. One such application is OS’s work with the engineering and design group Atkins. The UK government appointed Atkins to deliver a new data platform: the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) – a single, secure data-sharing service to record the location and characteristics of underground assets. Atkins is working with Ordnance Survey, 1Spatial, GeoPlace and the Greater London Authority. In April 2023, the first phase of NUAR launched, which covers the north-east of England, Wales and London.
Prior to NUAR, location data was siloed across different industries and stored in different formats. NUAR provides workers with an interactive, standardised digital view of the underground assets in a given location, reducing the risk of accidental strikes and resultant delays, costs and traffic disruption.
Also, improving access to datasets such as gas, water, and electricity supply lines in a secure way provides a significant advantage in surveying and risk assessment, thus reducing risks and helping to improve safety onsite.
The project follows on from OS’s creation of a combined underground infrastructure map for Northumbrian Water – which details water, wastewater, gas, electricity, telecoms and other underground services. Thanks to this, planners and excavation teams know exactly what lies where. Northumbrian Water estimates that the map will save it £1m a year, from a combination of reduced back-office effort to produce safe working maps and plans, lower costs associated with utility strikes, and fewer jobs being abandoned due to lack of information.
As with the interdependence between digital and physical connectivity, the worlds above and below ground are increasingly interdependent: you can’t fully maintain and monitor one without maintaining and monitoring the other – which makes sophisticated subterranean mapping ever more essential for both public and private sector organisations. Going beyond NUAR, OS is exploring its role in the design and delivery of other secure digital services on a national scale that require a neutral, trusted operator to aggregate and share geospatial information from multiple sources.
Location data can provide valuable insights for organisations looking to streamline processes and deliver services to customers more efficiently. Knowing exactly where your customers are, the types of spaces they occupy and how best to deliver services to them are critical elements for both government and businesses. The blending of location data and data-analysis can help provide all-important information about places, and identify solutions, enabling better decisions and greater efficiencies. OS identifies places by the way it captures the natural and built environment and how it creates identifiers for buildings (UPRNs) and streets (USRNs) which allows multiple information sets about these places to be brought together.
For example, OS AddressBase matches 46 million addresses to unique property reference numbers, identifying the exact location of each place. OS AddressBase accurately directs delivery drivers, for example, to specific addresses; they no longer waste time looking for a property in a street where the numbers are not in sequence or searching for places in complex urban environments. Using technology underpinned by OS AddressBase, McQueens Dairies, based in St Andrews, has optimised its milk deliveries to thousands of homes in Britain, cutting 100,000 miles a year from its rounds and significantly reducing fuel consumption. Admin has also been reduced as staff no longer spend hours manually planning routes.
“Other initiatives deploy technology, data and connectivity to the way roads are designed, built, managed and used. These initiatives are often referred to as Digital Roads, and the case for them is growing because of the transport challenges posed by the climate emergency, the ever present need to improve safety, the rise of internet-connected and automated transport services, increasing congestion and budgetary pressures on local authorities,” says Wheeler.
Again, authoritative, trusted location data can be brought to bear on these challenges. “For example, designing or modifying roads to better balance the needs of different road users – cars, freight, emergency services, cyclists and other active travellers – requires detailed location data and insights to enable local authorities to optimise how our roads support connectivity between places.
Improving transport networks is one element of broader efforts by urban planners and businesses to meet the infrastructure needs of the future – from building affordable homes and upgrading broadband coverage to installing electric vehicle charging points. Authoritative location data can therefore help the development of smart green cities of the future.
“Cities can’t just get bigger and bigger without intelligent planning,” says Wheeler. “Not only do you need to be able to make sure that core services in cities can cope as cities grow but, more importantly, [planners] need to be able to understand the proximity of services [to where people live], the time it takes them to get to work, the quality of the natural environment around them, and how long it takes them to get to green spaces. These are all important measures for a healthy urban environment and you can only answer those questions when you understand where everything is.”
As OS puts it: when you know a place better than anyone, you can make it better for everyone.
See a sustainable place | Let OS shine a light on your world | Ordnance Survey
