The OS Emergency Services Gazetteer (OS ESG) is a single centralised source of critical information that allows first responders to precisely identify locations when the need is greatest.

It was developed in collaboration with the Emergency Services, who provided invaluable feedback. It provides enhanced data, such as road and motorway junctions, that improves incident response, incident reporting and situational awareness.

The OS ESG offers a national view for Great Britain (i.e. England, Wales and Scotland). It is published in the AddressBase Premium format and aligns fully with requirements specified during extensive user engagement.

Key features

The key features of the OS ESG product are:

• Easy to filter and apply features: The OS ESG is easily filterable so you can select the features that you are interested in based on the classifications allocated to those features.

• Enhanced data for incident response and reporting: The gazetteer provides a single centralised source of information which allows for easier, faster and more precise identification of incident locations.

Product applications

The OS ESG enables emergency responders to be more accurately informed, improving emergency response times and public safety:

• Quick and accurate gazetteer searches

• Supports incident reporting and planning (for example, giving more accurate emergency response times)

• Enhanced data sharing across emergency services

• Supports incident and risk analysis and modelling (for example, analysing trends and patterns of road traffic collisions to both help identify risk and support incident planning)

• Improves operational reporting

Data source

The OS ESG is published in the AddressBase Premium format, aligning with requirements specified during user engagement. This is to ensure ease of use for the Emergency Services already consuming OS Address data in this format.

Datasets available

The following datasets are available within the OS ESG:

This contents of this table are subject to change with future releases of the product.

Index

This overview includes the following section:

• Product supply

Useful resources

• A helpful introductory Lightning Talk on the OS ESG is available on our 'More than Maps' site (a self-serve platform that provides a one-stop shop for all your OS technical geospatial support, including tutorials, demonstrators and case studies).

Available formats

The OS ESG is available in two formats:

• GeoPackage – Full Supply only

• Comma-separated values (CSV) – Full Supply and Change-Only Updates (COU)

It is not available in Geography Markup Language (GML) format.

GeoPackage overview

GeoPackage is an open standard data format as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). GeoPackage is designed to be a lightweight format that can contain large amounts of varied and complex data in a single, easy-to-distribute and ready-to-use file.

Please be advised that older versions of GIS software may need updating before being able to display and interact with GeoPackage files.

GeoPackage offers users the following benefits:

• The single file is easy to transfer and offers the end-user a rich experience.

• Attribute names are not limited in length, making it user-friendly.

• The file size limit is very large at 140TB, so lots of data can be easily accommodated (please note that a file size limit may be imposed by the file system to which the file is written).

• It supports raster, vector and database formats, making it a highly versatile solution.

• It is an OGC standard.

• In most cases, it is a plug and play format.

For information on how to open, use and understand a GeoPackage dataset, please refer to our ‘Getting Started with GeoPackage’ guide. Further detailed information on GeoPackage can be taken from the GeoPackage website.

CSV overview

CSV files are a delimited text file that uses commas or other characters to separate individual elements of a feature. It is used to store data, often in the form of a table. These tables can be freely loaded into databases and programs, allowing for the easy loading and updating of data holdings.

In the CSV supply of OS ESG:

• There is one record per line in each file.

• Fields are separated by commas.

• String fields are delimited by double quotes.

• No comma is placed at the end of each row in the file.

• Records are terminated by Carriage Return / Line Feed.

• Double quotes inside strings are escaped by doubling.

• COUs are available in this format.

Where a field has no value in a record, two commas are placed together in the record (one for the end of the previous field and one for the end of the null field). Where the null field is a text field, double quotes are included between the two commas, for example -, “”,

The CSV data is transferred using Unicode encoded in UTF-8. Unicode includes all the characters in ISO-8859-14 (Welsh characters).

The transfer is normally in a single file, but the data can be split into multiple files using volume numbers. The OS ESG records are provided within continuous files cut at approximately 1 million lines, as referred to above.

This means different record types (for example, BLPUs and LPIs) can be found in the same CSV file.

CSV header files

The CSV header files are available to download from the OS ESG Downloads page.

Supply mechanism

The OS ESG product is supplied as an online download from the OS Data Hub. You can select a data format (GeoPackage or CSV) during the download process.

Currency

The product will be refreshed on a monthly basis.

The OS ESG references unique street reference numbers (USRNs) in AddressBase Premium; however, there is a disconnect in publication schedules between the two products, with the OS ESG publishing monthly and AddressBase Premium publishing every six weeks.

The following table shows the corresponding publication schedule alignments between the two products: