Product applications

OS MasterMap Topography Layer is used extensively by businesses and organisations that need to relate their activities and / or their assets to the physical environment.

One of the most common uses for the product is by organisations who have their own GI and wish to examine it in relation to the real world around them. An example would be utility companies that have assets both at surface level and below surface level. They frequently need to visit these assets, either for repair, maintenance, or to add new assets. By viewing their infrastructure against the features in

OS MasterMap Topography Layer, it will help their crews locate the assets and become familiar with the area before they leave their depot, and it will allow them to provide a better user service by identifying those nearby premises that need to be notified about the works.

Taking this a stage further, many organisations need to derive their own GI from OS MasterMap Topography Layer. They use the individual features that Ordnance Survey provide to form the building blocks for their own sets of GI. Many local- and central-government organisations use the data in this way. A local authority, for example, may use it to maintain a register of land and buildings in their ownership.

Once they have the physical feature or group of features they are interested in, they can attach their own attribution to that already provided with the product. When this kind of data association takes place, it can lead to efficiencies in storing and using data. It can also enable data to be shared more easily both between and within organisations.

As more GI is created, it is possible to analyse the spread and distribution of features or activities and learn from their relationship to other physical features. For example, a police force might plot the locations of certain types of street crimes, and by analysing the pattern and the timing of the incidents against the local topography, they may be able to target their resources more efficiently.

OS MasterMap Topography Layer can also be used as part of a data modelling or a predictive modelling tool. In addition, OS MasterMap Topography Layer is also used by organisations looking for areas where specific physical conditions exist. A retailer, for example, may use OS MasterMap Topography Layer to help them find a site for a new store by using the attribution to find land parcels of a certain size and distance from a settlement or main road and cross referencing the information contained within OS AddressBase to identify an ideal catchment area. Emergency planners may use OS MasterMap Topography Layer to assist in planning and preparing for emergencies by identifying the areas most likely to be affected. The product can also be used to model the sequence of events in any given type of emergency, so that their own resources and command centres are unlikely to be cut off or taken out of action by the emergency itself.

It is possible to customise OS MasterMap Topography Layer styling as a way of clearly communicating GI in reports and presentations. GI can be conveyed more meaningfully in a map than by text or tables, making it easier to get points across to many different types of audience, whether they are key decision-makers, people inside the organisation, or members of the public. OS maintains an OS MasterMap Topography Layer Stylesheets page on GitHub with predesigned, schema-specific styling guides for the product.

It should be noted that the ability of an organisation to develop any or all the applications mentioned above will depend, in part, on the systems they use. Most GIS are capable of performing, to a greater or lesser degree, the applications already mentioned. Examples of other product applications for OS MasterMap Topography Layer include the following:

• Land management and property development

• Site planning

• Citizen services

• Location-based services on mobile devices

• Environmental monitoring

• Tourism and promotional material

• Risk assessment

• User service centres