This section of the getting started guide takes you through the process of downloading and extracting your AddressBase Core supply.
AddressBase Core is supplied in two optional offerings:
As a Managed Great Britain Set (MGBS) which provides national Great Britain data in one of two formats: Comma Separated Values (CSV) and GeoPackage (GPKG).
In 5km tiles in one of two formats: CSV and GPKG. CSVs are supplied as individual tiles where multiples are selected, whereas GPKG are only ever supplied as one file.
We recommend that you copy your data supply to a backup medium, particularly if you take a COU supply to keep an archive of records. Please read Applying COU to tables > With archiving for more Information on how to do this.
For reading purposes, we recommend you store the data on a single hard disc. This speeds up your computer's ability to read the data.
Unzipped file sizes for a full supply of the product are as follows:
CSV 8GB
GPKG 12GB
Unzipped file sizes of the COU will vary upon each release as this will be dependent on the number of changes or records within a given tile.
PSGA customers can download full supply and COU of AddressBase Core via our download service.
In the OS Data Hub click Download data, you will be required to enter a password to access the PSGA members’ area. On successful entry to the download service, you will be able to view all your orders in the members’ area and download your data.
If you have ordered your data from our online portal, you will be sent an email with a link to a download page.
Within the PSGA members’ area, you can order and download the data that you require by clicking on Order Data, which is found under the Map Data heading.
Once you have selected Order Data, you will be presented with the Order page. From here, you can manage all your orders, including those for AddressBase products.
When you have placed an order for a product, the data will become available as a zipped data file.
The CSV and GPKG data are supplied in a compressed form (zip
). Some software can access these files directly, while others will require it to be unzipped.
To unzip the zipped data files (.zip
extension), use an unzipping utility found on most PCs, for example, WinZip. Alternatively, open-source zipping/unzipping software can be downloaded from the Internet, for example, 7-Zip.
The first level zip folder will contain the following:
Order Details.txt
– a summary of the order including order type, format and information on files supplied.
Zipped folder with the product inside – this will be named as follows: AddressBaseCore_{variant}_{order_date_YYYY-MM-DD}_{file_number_NNN}.{format}.zip
variant: FULL
or COU
order_date: Date the order was received, for example, 2020-02-11
file_number: Three-digit zero padded file number, for example, 001
format: csv
, gpkg
Example:
AddressBaseCore_FULL_2020-01-30_001.gpkg.zip
or
AddressBaseCore_COU_2020-01-30_001.csv.zip
The product within the ZIP folder will use the same naming convention as above but without the .zip
at the end.
This getting started guide provides instructions for using AddressBase Core in different software applications. Users with limited technical knowledge will be able to follow this guide.
AddressBase Core is an easy-to-use, accessible addressing data product that gives plug-and-play access to complete and accurate address data. It combines key elements from existing AddressBase products into a simplified product.
AddressBase Core's primary source of addressing information is Local Authorities who have the statutory responsibility to capture and maintain Great Britain's address data. This ensures that the data is both authentic and authoritative in nature. Records are supplemented with Royal Mail Postal Address File (PAF) information and additional Ordnance Survey information on the usage of the address and unique identifiers that allow links to other OS and third-party datasets. Please read Data sources in AddressBase general for further details.
Access to AddressBase Core data via a Public Sector Plan, Premium Plan, or Energy & Infrastructure plan.
Basic technical knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and databases.
These instructions show you how to use AddressBase Core and include:
This is not an extensive list of the applications AddressBase Core can be used in; many other GIS software applications and/or databases can be used to load the product.
Ordnance Survey does not recommend specific suppliers or software products, as the most appropriate system will depend on many factors, for example, the amount of data being taken, resources available within the organisation, the existing and planned information technology infrastructure and the applications that AddressBase products can be used for
This section provides step-by-step instructions on how to load the GPKG format of AddressBase Core into commonly-used GIS software.
All AddressBase products are available as a full supply or a Change Only Update (COU).
A COU means you will only be supplied with the features which have changed since your last supply.
The following sub-sections provide guidance on how you could potentially manage a COU supply of AddressBase Core using PostgreSQL.
Where angle brackets (<>) are used, you should be replace the entire string with your content. For example:
Becomes:
If referencing a schema, <schema_name>, can be placed in front of any <table_name>, for example:
At a high level, there are three types of change found within COU:
Deletes (CHANGE_TYPE ‘D’) are objects that have ceased to exist in the product since the last product refresh.
Inserts (CHANGE_TYPE ‘I’) are objects that have been newly inserted into the product since the last product refresh.
Updates (CHANGE_TYPE ‘U’) are objects that have been updated in the product since the last product refresh.
Before a COU is applied, there may be a business requirement to archive existing address records. The diagram below shows how to implement archiving with an AddressBase Core COU within a database.
Within AddressBase Core there will be no records with the same UPRN. You can test this by checking the number of records that have the same UPRN. The following SQL query notifies you of any duplicates.
This query should return 0 rows, and this confirms that there are no duplicates. As there are no duplicate records, we can use the UPRN to apply the COU.
Where there is a business requirement to keep the records that are being Updated and Deleted in a separate archive table, the following SQL will create an Archive Table. It will populate with records that are being Updated and Deleted from the live AddressBase Core table.
The following commands create an archive table of the records that are being updated and deleted from the existing table, for example, addressbase_core_archive
.
Use the steps in Working with CSV data > Loading AddressBase Core into a database to load the COU CSV into a new or existing table, for example, addressbase_core_cou
.
If this table already exists, you can use INSERT INTO <
abcore_archive_table_name
>
, rather than CREATE TABLE <
abcore_archive_table_name
> AS
.
The following commands deletes the records from the existing table, which are either updates or deletions.
The following command inserts the new insert records and the new updated records into the live BLPU table.
You can check that this has been successful by re-checking that there are no duplicate UPRNs.
If there is no requirement for archiving, follow these steps:
Use the steps in Working with CSV data > Loading AddressBase Core into a database to load the COU CSV into a new or existing table, for example, addressbase_core_cou
.
Now, delete the existing records that will be updated, for example, Updates and Deletions.
Insert the new updated records.
You can check that this has been successful by re-checking that there are no duplicate UPRNs.
Tiled orders allow you to select a small region of Great Britain (GB), rather than having to order the whole of GB. Ordering tiles, as opposed to full GB coverage, reduces the amount of data supplied. This reduces data storage size and the time it takes to process the data.
AddressBase Core tiles can be downloaded through Ordnance Survey’s download service. See Downloading a dataset for full details about accessing this service. To order tiles:
Access the OS orders site and select AddressBase Core – 5km DOWNLOAD.
Select either a self-drawn polygon, a rectangle or a postcode/place. These options are available in the toolbar above the map. Once you have selected your area of interest (AOI), you can proceed to place your order.
Dependent on whether you are a PSGA customer or an OS Partner, the tiles are supplied as either GKPG or CSV.
You are provided with all 5km tiles that intersect the drawn polygon. The diagram below shows what is supplied when completing a tile order. An area of interest is drawn (blue lines) and a tile is provided for anywhere the drawn area of interest intersects (green lines).
For a GPKG download, you receive tiled data incorporated into one single GKPG file. For CSV tile supplies, individual 5km tiles are supplied for each tile which intersects your AOI.
The diagram below illustrates the format, coverage and supply type of AddressBase Core, specifically highlighting the tile supply options.
Each supply type is covered in the sections that follow.
Both GB coverage and tiled supply of GKPG is produced as a full supply only. Both product variants result in you receiving one consolidated GPKG file for your order.
To use this in your GIS software, please refer to Getting started with AddressBase Core > GPKG data, which provides instructions to load GPKG into ArcGIS Pro, ArcMap, QGIS, MapInfo Professional and CadCorp Map Modeller.
Tiled orders are also an option for CSV supplies of AddressBase Core. The CSV is divided into 5km tiles with an individual CSV produced for each tile. This is the case for both full supply and COU. Each CSV is also be provided with a header, which needs to be considered if you want to consolidate multiple individual tiles into one single file.
One use case for taking tiled coverage is if you only need a small subset of addresses within GB, as this provides you with a smaller data holding than taking all of GB .
If you are planning on using the tile supplies for COU purposes, you need to understand the data structure of the full supply and COU files you will download.
If you select to receive COU tile supplies, if any record within a selected 5km tile is changed between two releases of data (each week), you will receive the entire 5km tile in your next supply containing all of the latest live records for that tile.
For example, as demonstrated in the table below, the original full supply contains the address 17 THE BROADS, PAMPHILL, WIMBORNE, BH21 4DR, and the next COU data does not . However, the full supply does include an additional record, 37 THE BADGERS, PAMPHILL, BH21 4SH. This means that the 17 THE BROADS address has been deleted between the two releases, and 37 THE BADGERS is a new address.
To implement COU, we recommend that you process the full supply and the COU data files into a common structure to be used in conjunction with SQL. You can do this by appending a tilename
column onto the full supply and COU data when the CSVs are merged, as shown in the table below.
AddressBaseCore_COU_2020-01-30_SU2075.csv.zip
Ordnance Survey provides FME Workbench and NodeJS scripts to help to pre-process the data as described in the sections that follow. You can access these scripts in our GitHub repository:
A README file with usage instructions is provided for both scripts.
You do not need you to unzip the data before processing.
The data, either full supply or COU, should now be combined in one CSV file, under one header, with an appended tilename
column. Once the data has been pre-processed, it can be loaded into any database. The next sub-sections will detail the different loads of full supply and COU.
Once the full supply CSV has been pre-processed, the COPY load method can be used to load the data into your primary database table:
In this example, addressbase_core
is the name of the table. You may use a different name. To use this table in a geospatial setting, geometry columns will need to be inserted using the following SQL:
A similar method can be used to insert the COU data into a database. Similarly, addressbase_core_cou
is the name given to the database table. You may use a different name.
If you are applying COU to your primary table, you should now have two tables in your selected database:
A primary table which contains some out-of-date data.
A COU table with the live data.
To update your primary table, there are two basic steps to follow using SQL commands:
Delete all rows that contain tilenames that match the tilenames of the incoming COU.
Insert all rows from the COU table to the primary table.
The following SQL commands will complete the application of COU into the primary table:
Index the tilename column on to the primary table:
Index the tilename column on to the COU table: CREATE INDEX ON addressbase_core_cou (tilename);
Delete from the primary table any records which have a tilename that matches a tilename from your COU table:
Insert the live COU data into the primary table:
This is not an extensive list of the applications AddressBase Core can be used in; many other GIS software applications and/or databases can be used to load the product.
Ordnance Survey does not recommend specific suppliers or software products, as the most appropriate system will depend on many factors, for example, the amount of data being taken, resources available within the organisation, the existing and planned information technology infrastructure and the applications that AddressBase products can be used for.
This section provides step-by-step instructions on how to load the CSV format of AddressBase Core into commonly-used GIS software.
BIGINT/NUMBER: The ESRI products, ArcMap, ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server, do not support the BIGINT/NUMBER
data type as an Object ID. Bear this in mind if the expectation is to use this data type directly with these products. As an alternative method to facilitate using ESRI software, you can store this data as a string and add a new Serial ID to act as the Object ID.
Column length: If you are loading AddressBase Core data directly into a database, you may need to increase the column length to accommodate language characters such as ^
. Some databases treat this as an additional character and therefore if you define the column length according to our specification there is a chance the load may fail. Please bear in mind such adjustments may be required depending on the database you use to load the data.
UPRN deletions: It is important to note if a UPRN is deleted and then reinserted, this does not compromise the integrity of the UPRN and its use as a primary key. If a delete is issued for a UPRN, this does not mean it will not reappear in subsequent supplies. There are several reasons this may happen:
The record has moved in location more than once, moving it out of your area of interest (AOI; therefore the record is deleted) but then back into your AOI in the future. This could also occur if you alter your AOI.
A record has failed data validation upon a change being made. This can result dependent on the change being made in the record being deleted and then reintroduced when the error is fixed by the data supplier.
If a UPRN is deleted, it will not be reallocated to a different property and it therefore remains the unique identifier for a property.
The following sections describes how to load AddressBase Core into two popular databases.
Original full supply | COU records | COU change type |
---|---|---|
POST_TOWN | ISLAND | POSTCODE | DELIVERY_POINT_SUFFIX | GSS_CODE | CHANGE_CODE | TILENAME |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BUNGALOW, BLANDFORD ROAD, WIMBORNE MINSTER, BH21 4DS
BUNGALOW, BLANDFORD ROAD, WIMBORNE MINSTER, BH21 4DS
I (INSERT)
17 THE BROADS, PAMPHILL, WIMBORNE, BH21 4DR
No data supplied
Not applicable
33 THE BROADS, PAMPHILL, WIMBORNE, BH21 4DR
33 THE BROADS, PAMPHILL, WIMBORNE, BH21 4DR
I (INSERT)
No data supplied
37 THE BADGERS, PAMPHILL, BH21 4SH
I (INSERT)
SN4 0HJ
1A
E06000030
I
SU2075
MARLBOROUGH
SN8 1SZ
1A
E06000054
I
SU2075
MARLBOROUGH
SN8 1SZ
1B
E06000054
I
SU2075