Ordnance Survey Overview

Introduction

Digimap Ordnance Survey provides mapping from Ordnance Survey, Britain’s mapping agency.

The collection contains maps at scales ranging from 1:1,250 up to 1:5,000,000 for users to view and/or download. Some data products are available to download in Data Download but cannot be viewed in Digimap.

Data products may be available under the terms of either the Digimap Educational User license, the Open Government licence or the Improvement Service Educational User licence.

OS MasterMap®

OS MasterMap® offers the most detailed mapping available of Great Britain, regularly updated by the Ordnance Survey. Several OS MasterMap®data products are available via Digimap Collections.

The Topography Layer is the foundation of the OS MasterMap® family. It provides an accurate visual context to help you interpret addresses, routes and imagery provided by the other layers. With OS MasterMap® Topography Layer, each feature is a record in a database. Each of these records has information about the feature’s position and shape on Earth – its geometry – as well as details about it termed ‘attributes’.

Building Height Attribute is an enhancement to the Topography layer and offers height attributes for buildings, which can be joined to the Topography layer to visualise data heights and enable richer planning.

OS MasterMap® Sites Layer provides a nationally maintained view of the detailed extents of important locations such as airports, schools, hospitals, utility and infrastructure sites and more.

OS MasterMap® Highways Network is the most complete, detailed and accurate routable road network dataset for Great Britain. It records the dimensions and accessibility of roads.

OS MasterMap® Water Network Layer provides a detailed centre line following the curve of the waterway precisely. It includes the coordinates of watercourse sources and where they meet, exactly.

OS Greenspace makes it easier to locate greenspaces. Understand the location of public parks, playing fields, sports facilities, play areas and allotments, along with access points for entering and exiting urban and rural greenspaces.

Backdrop mapping

Ten high-quality raster data products are available to view/download in Digimap Ordnance Survey, at scales ranging from 1:1000 to 1:5000000. Digital versions of the popular OS Explorer and OS Landranger maps are available, as well as regional and GB overview maps. Raster versions of OS MasterMap® data are provided (note that these are produced by Digimap).

Vector data

Several topographic vector data products are available, in a range of scales and formats.

Land and Height data

OS Terrain 5 is available as a Digital Terrain Model or as contours only. Ideal for 3D visualisations, it models significant landscape features including roads, railways, slopes, quarries and lakes, and offers a typical accuracy level greater than 2m RMSE. You can quickly understand the impact of flash floods on roads, homes and other major infrastructure. OS Terrain 5 adds the third dimension to OS MasterMap®Topography Layer. You won’t find another height product with this level of consistency, currency and detail.

OS Terrain 50, less detailed than OS Terrain 5, is also provided as a Digital Terrain Model or as contours only. The data helps you visualise simple landscapes; helping users make decisions such as modelling flood risk, soil erosion, placement of wind turbines.

Boundary and location data

Several data products are available for those analysing GB locations.

• Points of Interest® is the most comprehensive, location-based directory of all public and privately-owned businesses, education and leisure services in Britain, with more than 4 million records.
• Code-Point offers postcode polygons and listings.
• Boundary-Line provides several layers of administrative boundary data, including; county boundaries, unitary authorities, electoral boundaries and voting boundaries.
• OS Open Names is a comprehensive dataset of place names, roads numbers and postcodes for Great Britain.

OS Identifiers

These provide authoritative relationships between various feature identifier schemes including Unique Property References (UPRNs), Unique Street Reference Numbers (USRNs), Topographic Identifiers (TOIDs) and meta data to enable reliable matching for greater data connectivity.

OS Northern Ireland

Several data products from OS Northern Ireland’s Open Data are available, provided by OS Northern Ireland. The data includes medium scale vector topographic mapping, local scale raster mapping, Digital Terrain Models, gazetteers and boundary data.

Improvement Service - Scotland

The Improvement Service for Scotland provides quality-assured Scottish local authority data, in a consistent format. Data themes include planning, administrative boundaries, environmental, transport and community facilities.

Archived datasets

Several data products no longer updated by Ordnance Survey can be downloaded from Digimap Ordnance Survey, including;

• OS Land-Line (the predecessor of OS MasterMap).
• Streetview, a street scale map.
• Merdian, a regional map.
• Strategi, a national map.
• 1:50000 scale Gazetteer of Great Britain.