OS Open Linked Identifiers Technical Specification
This technical specification provides detailed technical information about OS Open Linked Identifiers. It is targeted at technical users and software developers.
Last updated
This technical specification provides detailed technical information about OS Open Linked Identifiers. It is targeted at technical users and software developers.
Last updated
OS Open Linked Identifiers is a dataset containing the authoritative relationships between Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), Unique Street Reference Numbers (USRNs) and Topographic Identifiers (TOIDs), and metadata. Identifiers are labels that are assigned to representations in a dataset. They are at the heart of how data can be effectively published, retrieved, reused and linked.
| Feature Type | Identifier Type | Source Product | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
TopographicArea | TOID | OS MasterMap Topographic Layer | Polygon limited to either a building outline or road surface area. |
RoadLink | TOID | OS MasterMap Highways | Section of road from junction to junction. |
Road | TOID | OS MasterMap Highways | Collection of RoadLink with a given name. |
BLPU (Building Land Parcel Unit) | UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number) | AddressBase Premium | An address location with postal address. |
Street | USRN (Unique Street Reference Number) | OS MasterMap Highways | An identifier allocated to a street by a local authority. |
ORRoadLink/ ORRoadNode | GUID | Open Roads | Road sections and junctions from our open data product. These features are referred to in OS Open Roads as RoadLink and RoadNode. In this product they are referred to as ORRoadLink and ORRoadNode respectively to distinguish them from the OS MasterMap Highways Networks RoadLink and RoadNode features. |
OS Open Linked Identifiers enables you to connect the variety of relationships between UPRN, USRNs and TOIDs. These are extracted from premium products to provide you with the most up-to-date feature metadata sourced from AddressBase, OS MasterMap Highways Network and OS MasterMap Topography Layer. The more an identifier is used in other datasets, the more valuable the primary data becomes.
For example, OS Open Identifiers enables visualisation of data linked to the Highways RoadLink and Open Roads products. By sharing the road link mapping between Highways and Open Roads it enables data that has been collected and shared against the Highways’ premium products to be visualised in the open geometry.
Identifiers are crucial to the process of sharing information and linking together datasets, allowing them to fit into many workflows in many different types of workplace to provide powerful insights and support analytics.
A UPRN is a unique numeric identifier for every addressable location in Great Britain. The identifier is critical for property related information and can be found throughout OS's AddressBase products. An addressable location may be any kind of building, residential or commercial, or it may be an object that might not have a ‘normal’ address – such as a bus shelter or an electricity substation. UPRNs provide these addressable locations with a consistent, persistent identifier never being reused.
A USRN is a unique and persistent identifier for every street, road, track, path, cycletrack or way in Great Britain. It can be found in the OS MasterMap Highways Network products and is also a key component in OS’s AddressBase suite of products.
A TOID is a unique identifier, consisting of the letters ‘osgb’ and followed by either thirteen or sixteen digits, associated with every feature in many of Ordnance Survey’s large-scale products. The TOID is based upon the Digital National Framework concept and the principles that underpin it. In order for the TOID to be effective, it is essential that the reference given to it by OS remain unaltered in any way.
