🆕Royal Mail Address Feature Type
A Lightning Talk
What are the layers in OS NGD Address v3?
The address data will be broken into two collections GB and Island addresses each comprising of six feature types:
Built Address. Addresses locating properties and facilities.
Historic Address. Addresses assigned to property units no longer in existence.
Non-Addressable Object. Addresses assigned to property units no longer in existence.
Pre-Build Address. Plot addresses and/or definitive addresses for property units.
Street Address - USRN. Address locating the Street that Property and Non-Addressable Objects are located on or near to.
Royal Mail Address. New Feature type containing Delivery Point Address data defined by Royal Mail and additional attribution. With the addition of the Royal Mail Address the Postal Address related components table no longer exists as its contents is now part of the feature type.
What formats does the OS NGD data come in?
The OS NGD Address 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 attribute with the vertices stored as co-ordinates in the text file.
With the exception of the Street Address feature, there are additional related components tables that can be joined to features.
What is the attribution?
For the built, prebuild, historic and non addressable objects the attribution is consistent.
Geometry
Royal Mail Address records will contain a 2D point geometry in BNG (EPSG: 27700) for the GB Address Collection and WGS84 (EPSG: 4326) for the Islands Address Collection. >99% of Royal Mail Address PAF records have been directly matched to a Local Authority Record and subsequently the Local Authority geometry has been attached to the Royal Mail record. Direct matches could be a Built Address, Historic Address, Pre-build Address or Non-addressable Object that is not a street record. If the PAF record was unable to be directly matched to a Local Authority record, then it may be matched to a Parent, Neighbour or Street record in Local Authority data to give the PAF record an estimated position. It is important to note that these geometries do not represent the exact point where mail/parcels are delivered.
Match Type and Geometry Allocation
Direct – A PAF record with a direct match will be matched to a Built address, Historic address, Pre-build address or Non-addressable Object that is not a street record. When a direct match is achieved, then the PAF record will be allocated the Local Authority record’s geometry.
Multi-matches
In previous OS NGD versions, it has not been possible to match multiple UDPRNs to a single UPRN, but this is now possible.
Therefore, a UPRN can be present in the Royal Mail Address feature type more than once.
UPRNs will be matched to UDPRNs daily by GeoPlace.
Royal Mail Address vs AddressBase Premium Delivery Address Comparison
Distribution options
Owing to the combination of Royal Mail PAF, Ordnance Survey and Local Authority attribution, there are different options of distribution and licensing of this data depending on the level of attribution you require.
Links that may be useful:
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 PSGA members area of the OS website
Last updated
Was this helpful?