OS NGD Geographical Names
A Lightning Talk
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A Lightning Talk
Last updated
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There are currently 4 features in the Named Feature Collection
A settlement, locality, geographical feature, or area of water that has a name, represented as a polygon.
The OS NGD Geographical Names data comes in two formats, CSV and GeoPackage (GPKG)
The GeoPackage format comes ready to load into the GIS package of the users choice with different gpkg files for each layer.
The CSV format is more suited for loading into a database. It has all of the same layers in csv format and all the same attribution as the GeoPackage, however instead of storing the geometry in a GIS-ready format, it is stored as a POINT and POLYGON attributes (for ‘Named Point’ and ‘Named Area’ respectively), with all of the vertices stored as co-ordinate pairs in the text file.
These features are point representations of named places. These include various settlements ranging from cities to hamlets, natural areas such as mountains, hills, valleys, and estuaries, and other named urban localities such as suburbs and railway depots.
This has some correspondence to the OS Open Names dataset, except it is more restricted in the place types included
Post codes and roads are excluded
Other place types such as education institutions do not feature
There are many new named places included in the OS NGD dataset which did not feature in OS Open Names, especially small neighbourhoods such as Larkbeare and Wessex Estate in Exeter
The same set of features as Named Point, but with their geographical extent represented as polygons.
This is a new dataset. OS Open Names does not provide polygon geographies
Named places range from very small patches of land to vast geographies such as the North Sea, the Moray Firth, and the Western Highlands
The options for the attribute Description Group:
Land Name
An area of land with particular land cover characteristics, or in some cases with particular land use characteristics which cannot be captured as a Site, that has a distinctive name.​
Landform Name
A feature on the Earth's surface that is part of the terrain, that has a distinctive name.​
Other Name
Applied to named extents that do not fall into any other category.​
Settlement
A settlement, locality or populated place is a community in which people live. The size of a settlement can range from a small number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanised areas. Settlements may include hamlets, villages, towns and cities.​
Water Name
A body of inland or tidal water that has a distinctive name.​
The Named Area polygon geometries have been defined in two ways, indicated by the Extent Definition attribute​
Manually Defined Complete are where polygons have been manually drawn from other OS data, satellite imagery, and ​(in the case of settlements) historical OS records. These are drawn to best represent the real-word extent (as opposed ​to official or administrative definitions).​
Auto-Generated Indication are those which have been not yet been manually drawn (see images, right). These are typically one of the following.​
Hills, which have been approximated as round regular polygons, as their true definition is ambiguous.​
Bodies of water automatically identified from OS MasterMap Topography Layer.​
For other types of feature, a convex hull containing the name label(s) as they appear in OS MasterMap Topography Layers.​
A named intersection between roads at a junction or roundabout. The intersection may be numbered, have an official name or be assigned a modeled name based on the names of the intersecting roads.
A road junction that is part of a road classified as A Road that has an official number.
Geometry: Motorway Junctions and Roundabouts are a single point geometry in OS Emergency Services Gazetteer and Multipoint geometry in Named Junction
Schema: OS Emergency Services Gazetteer is in an AddressBase Premium format and Named Junctions have an OS NGD schema
Attribution: OS Emergency Services Gazetteerhas an AREA_NAME. There is no AREA_NAME on the Named Junction feature
Classification: OS Emergency Services Gazetteerhas a classification scheme and Named Junction has a description
The data in the Crowd Sourced Names feature type comes from a single source, that is the Vernacular Names Tool that Emergency Services have had access to. These are the only contributors and the spread of the data in this feature type is completely dependent and who has submitted data. Maritime and Coastguard Agency are by far the largest, giving coverage all around the coast, but other Blue Light Services have also contributed data in their areas.
Where possible, the submitted data has been matched an existing OS feature although this is not always possible. The feature that is matched to can vary, so it could be a site, a structure, a named area, an address, a building or a combination of 2 or more of these. As a result, the data has information on the osid and feature type that it is being matched to, so you know where to find the feature in OS NGD.
There can also be more than one named associated to a single feature, such as the Blinking Eye Bridge and Winking Eye Bridge both for the Millennium Bridge in Gateshead.
The names are published as they are submitted, without editing, this does result in some entries being all lowercase or all UPPERCASE, or with extra punctuation.
Links that may be useful:
More information on OS Emergency Services Gazetteer can be found in the
This content has been developed from what was originally a Lightning Talk PowerPoint slide set. These slides are available to PSGA members to view and download from the
