‘What happens at the next Lockerbie?’ – the risks of killing NIMSA
One of the points that I made during the Open Knowledge Foundation meeting in London last week was that the Ordnance Survey knows when everything changes. It has a mission to map the UK, and pretty much anything the size of a garden shed will get noticed by its overflights. (Wouldn’t local authorities love to know about changes in their areas that conformed or didn’t to planning permission? How much do they have to pay if they do?)
I’ve been to OS – which apparently six of the eight past ministers in charge of OS haven’t – and seen the work they do loading the overflight data onto the MasterMap. It’s impressive. The OS target is to get 99.6% of changes in the database within six months.
However the end of the National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) last year means that the OS gets no subsidy to map areas that are out of the way. If it’s having to compete with a growing number of commercial services (apparently the latest one Vanessa Lawrence is concerned about is China’s mapping agency), how can it justify mapping remote areas at that speed?
Ed Parsons, former chief technology officer at Ordnance Survey, says that it won’t. “Areas in cities will get updated, but in Scotland your new garden shed might not be noticed for five years.” Nice for your garden shed – but what happens when a plane or a tanker or some other disaster happens in that remote area that has been neglected because of the death of NIMSA?
That is why the Free Our Data campaign says that Ordnance Survey is valuable – and that the government has a responsibility to citizens to make sure the UK is well mapped, within the public sector. Duncan Shiell of OS, who spoke at the NCeSS event, said that between the wars, councils did a lot of the mapping – but that when the OS was re-funded back to strength and took it over, it discovered that many of the maps didn’t join up across county boundaries... explains what happened between the wars in the comments (Any errors are mine, from misremembering.)
We think the point remains though. That’s why you need a well-funded – taxpayer-funded, not privatised – OS.
- The following posts may be related...(the database guesses):
- NIMSA is dead: bad news for Ordnance Survey - and free data? (2 November 2006; score: 36.74%)
- The money-go-round, and the truth about Ordnance Survey funding (6 February 2007; score: 33.15%)
- Should Ordnance Survey be split into two? (9 November 2006; score: 27.95%)
- Media: why Norwich Union had to map the UK all over again (30 March 2006; score: 24.87%)
- Ononemap.com to close, pursued by Environment Agency (updated) (9 October 2008; score: 16.73%)
March 20th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Charles
For a year now I have resisted the temptation to challenge what I believe to be a number of misinterpretations of information presented as fact within the Free our Data campaign stories, but when you publish a story misinterpreting something I said to you over dinner after the seminar in Manchester last week, I can no longer hold back.
When I was outlining the impacts of the level of funding of Ordnance Survey between in the 1920s and 1930s, I said there were very understandable reasons for the funding streams being what they were at the time. In that discussion, I also made reference to County Series mapping and then went on to talk about the far-sighted recommendations of the Davidson Committee, established in 1935 to review the future of National Mapping.
The County Series of mapping at 1:2500 and 1:10560 was initiated in the mid 19th Century and was wholly the responsibility of Ordnance Survey. Although called County Series, there was no responsibility attaching to Local Government.
Each County or group of Counties was mapped by Ordnance Survey using a separate Central Meridian and Scale Factor. For example, Middlesex was combined with Hertfordshire on the meridian of St Paul’s and later 15 Counties were combined on the Dunnose median.
As a result of the low levels of funding, it was realised in the mid 1930s that national mapping was perhaps no longer fit for purpose. The Davidson Committee reported in 1938 that the 1:2500 and 1:10560 series were still projected on 39 different meridians.
It was always known within Ordnance Survey that an inherent weakness of the County Series was the fact that significant discontinuities existed along County boundaries. We did not therefore ‘discover’ this fact by chance, nor did I ever suggest that the discontinuity was as a result of mapping by Councils!
The Davidson Committee took a long term view of the future and recommended that the mapping of Great Britain be cast on a single National Grid and Ordnance Survey started an extensive (and expensive) programme that took over 40 years to complete to convert all the mapping onto the National Grid with co-ordinates expressed in OSGB36.
Since that exercise completed in the early 1980s, Ordnance Survey has followed a rigorous policy of continuous revision. It is far more economic to maintain up-to-date mapping in a continuous programme than it is to let mapping deteriorate and update it on only a cyclical basis.
We have also known at all times that mapping and co-ordinates that have evolved using techniques that date back over 200 years will not fit exactly with mapping and co-ordinates derived from 21st century systems. The major positional accuracy improvement programme of 2000 to 2006 and continuing quality improvement programme for the digital age has ensured that the core topographic mapping in Great Britain is immediately interoperable with additional geographic information collected, maintained and made available by ourselves and other stakeholders in the geographic information industry.
I am on record as saying that the Trading Fund model has contributed to the greatest customer focus in Ordnance Survey’s history and contributing to the implementation of efficiencies and fit-for-purpose processes. I am also on record as saying that the user-pays model means that the customer has strong levers to insist on the right quality of data and information at the right time at the right price.
Regards
Duncan
Duncan Shiell
Director of Strategy
Ordnance Survey
March 20th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
[...] read full story [...]
March 20th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Duncan, I’ve corrected – as far as I think you’re saying what I wrote was wrong – the post.
“User pays” is certainly one model. That doesn’t answer though how one funds the situation where the user – say, the emergency services at some indeterminate point in the future – isn’t there now, meaning you need a “national interest” element.
If you don’t provide that through something like NIMSA, it acts as a drag on the OS’s ability to compete with commercial organisations that cherry-pick. British Telecom complained for years – still does, I think – about the requirement that it should offer universal service, and phone boxes.
User pays works when you can identify the user, but you can easily get market failure if the user lies somewhere in the future. The case of Hurricane Katrina is an obvious example (cited by Ed Parsons in his talk) where the USGS failed its future users because its maps were out of date.
And… the Office for National Statistics isn’t a trading fund. Why not? We rely on its data for important things like working out inflation, trade statistics and so on. Surely the “user” should pay for that, under this argument?
March 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm
NIMSA was much more than simply the mapping of unprofitable areas. It was the incipient implementation of a UK GSDI (Geospatial Data Infrastructure) which would allow data and datasets to be shared among organisations which were creating interesting and unique geo information. Gigateway was the metadata hub for the discovery of these datasets from standardised metadata creations. Gigateway ( http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/cgi-bin/fullrecord.pl?handle=humbul3343 ) itself was derived from several years of thoughtful discussion called the National Geospatial Data Framework (NGDF: http://www.gigateway.org.uk/moreinformation/pdf/archive/NGDF%20from%20concept%20to%20reality.pdf,
http://www.gigateway.org.uk/moreinformation/pdf/archive/NGDF%20Summary%20and%20Status.pdf).
However, gigateway was barely supported by the Ordnance Survey in spite of the fact that the funding was funnelled via OS to the AGI which managed the project. An SDI is most certainly not in the best interests of a monolithic national mapping agency which wishes to control, licence and profit from all geodata which is created in the UK. OS now proposes its “Digital National Framework” as the ultimate SDI based on its own proprietary MasterMap TOID. OS will deny this of course but if it looks like an SDI, smells like an SDI…..etc. Meanwhile, the collaborative and innovative gigateway has faded to grey. A real loss to the United Kingdom.