OS MasterMap Topography Layer – Building Height Attribute Getting Started Guide

This getting started guide provides instructions for using OSMM Topography Layer – BHA in different software applications. Users with limited technical knowledge will be able to follow this guide.

OS MasterMap Topography Layer – Building Height Attribute is an enhancement to the OS MasterMap Topography Layer product. The enhancement is supplied in a comma-separated values (.csv) format and is supplied separately from OS MasterMap Topography Layer’s Geography Markup Language (GML) data files. Therefore, if you want to use the Building Height Attribute data, you will need to join the two files first.

No schema changes to OS MasterMap Topography Layer are required to use the Building Height Attribute data.

The Building Height Attribute dataset is derived from and dependant on multiple other data sources, so is reliant on their accuracy. In addition, if a building has multiple heights or is in close proximity to an extreme landscape change (if it is on a hill or by a river, for example), then this may affect the data quality. Multiple quality checks are made on the data before release to mitigate any errors, and confidence levels are high on the dataset, but please verify or contact OS if any of the data does not look correct.

This Getting Started Guide is designed to walk you through the steps you need to take to join the Building Height Attribute data with OS MasterMap Topography Layer data within a geographic information system (GIS). The guide also outlines how to load the data into a database.

Within this guide, there are parts showing you how to re-structure the unique topographic identifier (TOID). We would advise against this as doing so means you will be unable to confidently match the feature in the dataset to other OS products or datasets using TOIDs or OpenTOIDs as their feature identifier.

First, you will need to check the format of your TOIDs in your translated OS MasterMap Topography Layer data and compare it to the format of the TOIDs in the Building Height Attribute data. The format of the TOIDs needs to be the same so that the Building Height Attribute data can be joined with the OS MasterMap Topography Layer data. The step-by-step instructions on how to do this can be found in managing .CSV data.

If you will be using the data in a GIS, you will then need to load the Building Height Attribute data into your GIS and join it with the OS MasterMap Topography Layer data. The step-by-step instructions on how to do this can be found in loading data into a GIS and Joining to a OSMM Topography layer.

If you will be using the Building Height Attribute data in a database environment, then the data will need to be imported into a database. The step-by-step instructions on how to do this can be found in importing data into a database.

Index

This Getting Started Guide includes the following sections:

Last updated