Hi, good afternoon everybody. Um, my name's Chris Lucas.
I'm one of the vice presidents of British Chatco.
Uh, I'd like to introduce this afternoon's speakers.
Uh, they're gonna be speaking about a geospatial response to COVID-19.
Uh, we've got Matt Ricketts from Ordnance Survey.
And Rick Crowhurst from Landmark.
Now Matt is going to go first, he's actually presenting from online,
so you should hear his voice and presentation up on screen.
There will be an opportunity at the end of the session to ask questions as well,
uh, across to yourself, Matt.
Thank you can hear me good afternoon from Guilford.
Thanks very much for the British Aco for having us this afternoon and particularly for
accommodating us in a hybrid capacity.
Many thanks to all of the the folk who've helped us get set up for this afternoon.
Um, I'm a senior consultant for the survey, on the survey being Great Britain's national
mapping agency, and I'm joined this afternoon with by my colleague Rick Crowhurst.
We're going to be talking about mapping from emergencies, the public sector geospatial
agreement, and again, I'll then hand over to Rick, who's senior public sector manager at
Landmark Information Group from the OS part community, who's going to talk about points of
interest data and how we use POI in the pandemic.
So to kick us off this afternoon, I just want to give a bit of a background and really
reflect on OS as an organisation, where we started and where we are today,
really. So our history begins in the late 1700s,
where our engineers were asked to geodetically connect the Royal Observatories of Greenwich
and Paris together, and this was to solve a dispute over their relative location to one
another. Many measurements, maps later, OS would go on
to creating more than 350 million maps. During the two World Wars,
we would retriangulate and remap the entirety of Great Britain through the creation of trade
pillars, these white statues you see on top of hills when you go out walking.
And then more recently in 1995, we became the first country in the world to complete a
programme of large scale electronic mapping.
As we kind of move across to today though, you know, investments have been made to really
bring us up to date and help us collect and maintain even richer data than before.
And we achieve this through a combination of sources.
We do this through field surveyors, global navigation satellite systems,
or GNSS, remote sensing, and a range of advanced GIS tools and software packages.
While the public still know us for our comprehensive range of printed leisure maps,
those that you take out on your on your walking and on your hikes,
the digital side of our business actually accounts for more than 90% of our turnover,
and really it's public and private sectors to benefit from this accurate information about
location, so therefore deliver their own effective and efficient services.
So moving on to something called the PSGA, you may be familiar with this,
this may be something new to you.
Um, the PSGA is the public sector geospatial agreement, and this is an agreement signed with
the Geospatial Commission and OS in April 2020.
Geospatial commissioner and expert committee within the Cabinet Office,
and this agreement formally replaces PSMA or OSMA, um,
that you may have formerly known those agreements as.
This agreement provides 3 things to public sector organisations data,
services, and technical support.
So kind of diving into each of these from a data perspective,
this is really the provision of location data sets such as OS master map.
You may be familiar with that already.
A master map is one of the world's largest spatial databases and provides the most
comprehensive view of Great Britain's landscape made up of over half a billion.
objects. These objects, such as the precise location of
buildings, could be roads, could be parks, enable complex analysis to take place about
about our landscape.
For example, customers may be considering the locations of buildings in proximity to water
courses in the context of flooding.
Moving over geospatial services, and this is predominantly looking about how OS shares our
data and provides our customer base with even better access to it than before.
Historically, many of our customers, some of you in the room will have received a DVD in the
post to update your data holdings. However, API services now allow our customers
to interact with our content without needing to hold any of it locally in-house.
So for example, our OS places API provides our customers customers with the ability to look.
Up addresses when they're engaging with your organisation.
So, you know, you may have seen this before if you order a parcel online,
you'll be typing in your address and it's captured and verified against an authoritative
list. And all of that takes place without the need of
having to hold a database of over 40 million addresses, so very handy to keep things light
on the ground. And then finally, I just wanted to talk about
technical support, uh, and this is one of the key ways in which the PSGA differs from its,
um, its predecessor, uh, and the inclusion of technical support is to our public sector
customers. Again, at no cost to the user and essentially
funded by government, where my team of regionally based consultants are on hand to
provide an array of support, anything from loading and ingesting our data into your
systems all the way through to complex geographical visualisation and analysis,
perhaps in the context of an emergency response.
Many of our customers will be in the room, uh, and hello to you if you are,
um, and if you've not engaged with us before or would like to find out more about what the PSGA
could do for you, then please do get in touch, uh, some of my colleagues are there with you in
the room today, and then we have to have a chat.
So, moreover, you know, as well as the provision of data,
services and technical support, OS provide customers mapping for emergency service,
and this is primarily to our resilience community and mapping for emergencies,
or we call it MFE is available 24/7, 365 at no cost to the user.
MC is about providing emergency responders, particularly Category 1 and 2 responders,
and surge capacity support to better respond to those emergency events.
We can provide a variety of support either remotely in this hybrid world or in situ,
perhaps part of a police command centre where appropriate.
And the kind of things we can provide are such as but not limited to geospatial analysis,
bespoke mapping, extracting key features from our data sets,
or be, you know, providing in situ support to SCGs or TCGs for local resilience forums.
A pictured on the site here on the right is an example of where we've previously used the MFE
service to support customers, and this was in the make when a major incident was declared at
Topbrook Reservoir in Way Bridge.
Several heavy days of rain caused, you know, the the slipway to be damaged,
significant damage to the infrastructure where there was a risk of inundation for communities
further down the way.
MFA was called up by the civil contingencies and resilience unit from Greater Manchester and
other local authorities in the area to support an extraction of key features.
For example, where our residential dwellings who might need to be evacuated or identify key
infrastructure that was a potential risk from inundation.
And again, if you'd like to find out more about the MFE service,
please head to our website. The link is just on the slide there,
or if you'd like to discuss this further and how this could work for your organisation,
please do get in touch, uh, as the more people know about this,
the better. So looking into the future, uh, and really
following user engagement with all of our customers, again,
some of you will be in the room. We're looking at the next generation of data
sets and services that fall within these key sectors and themes.
And under them we're delivering new data and enhanced content and really ensuring our future
deliverables are optimised for analytics. So when our customers get it,
they plug and play and easy to use directly in your applications and also providing with up to
daily updates. So typically you might have taken our location
data on a six weekly interval for certain things, we'll be providing up to daily updates.
So you've got the very latest version of the Truth.
Diving into one of these key themes, geographical names,
and things that could be interest to the community within the room today are,
for example, the emergency services gazette.
The ESG is a comprehensive and maintained repository of key places and names for
locations of interest to the emergency services and our community.
These locations of interest could be non-addressable, such as road junctions,
motorway marker posts and bridges, locations where the emergencies are likely to happen.
And this is really to assist officers and responders getting to the scene as fast as they
can. To also assist on the more fuzzy aspect of
emergency response, such as people's perception of place and location,
we're also working on vernacular name catcher, and here you'll have access to alternative
names for places.
So a key example here is everybody knows it's the Gherkin in London,
where actually it's addressable name is 30 St.
Mary's A.
And then secondly, we're making enhancements and improvements to our addressing data,
and one of those key things to note is the improvement in level attribution.
Here we're enhancing and improving the level of detail contained within that data,
so it's analytically usable.
And shout out to my colleague Egg Bay Manners in the room,
who's leading the future PSGA side of things from a national security and resilience
perspective and protection of life.
Um please give Eggbay a shout if you'd like to find any more information about these
deliverables. So next up, I want to, and before I hand over
to Rick, I wanted to talk about an example of how our data and technical support has been in
action, and this is where recently we've supported local emergency responders and
central government national security bodies in both their planning and their operational
response to the G7 summit that took place in Cornwall earlier this year.
Yeah. Working with that variety of customers,
OS set out to do these 4 things for that event. So working left to right.
Firstly, it all starts with data capture and so we formed some bespoke data capture for all all
of those customers where we captured 4 centimetre high resolution imagery.
This is a small excerpt there from the flight plan, and you can see we captured that for the
key sites of the summit.
Um, this imagery was captured with 80% overlap in every single direction,
allowing us to do some cool stuff, um, with the outputs.
More on that shortly.
Secondly, with the combination of that imagery and our surveyors on the ground,
we were able to update our topography layer master map to ensure it was fully up to date.
All changes were captured again for those key sites, Cardiff Bay pictured there,
and this was really to ensure that everything that was on the ground was in our geospatial
data to allow emergency responders to respond and plan to the best of their ability.
Those two key things and those two key bespoke methods of capture allowed us to produce these
two key pieces of outputs.
Firstly, we're able to produce high resolution 5 centimetre or rectified imagery.
An author rectified image is multiple images stitched together to remove any lean of
buildings and so on, as well as digital surface and terrain models.
Using all of that in combination, we were then able to produce 3D mesh models and more on this
shortly, and this allows local responders to have a real eye on the ground,
situational awareness without having needing to be in the area.
Of course, G7 was challenged and, you know, had a COVID dimension to it,
meaning officers and forces and government agencies weren't able to be on the ground,
perhaps as much as they could have been outside of the pandemic.
So these resources and deliverables were really about providing that situational context to
officers to help them plan in advance and best allocate resources.
Hopefully the slides are going to change now and take you through a bit of a screen share of
that 3D mesh model. So this is the model in a piece of software
called Terror Explorer, where here you can see panning into the model and this is how a
customer might interact with this location data.
And hopefully when we get closer into Carbu Bay, Carvi Hotel,
just here, you can see how crisp the imagery is, how crisp the 3D data is.
You've got a train viaducts just behind the hotel there and can see the level of detail is
provided to all of our customers.
Again, this allowed, for example, local police forces to,
uh, best plan the allocation of officers in the local area without needing to be there.
Uh, therefore they could, uh, do that planning and preparation in the safety of their home or,
or remotely from the sites.
Another key benefit of this being 3D, and the combination of heights and imagery is that you
could then do some cool exercises and routines like view shed.
So this exercise or tooling that's being demoed here is assuming perhaps we positioned an
officer at this.
What might they be able to see in terms of, um, you know,
VIPs, or in reverse if a threat was positioned on that rooftop,
what might they be able to see?
Therefore, how do we need to effectively place that again to protect VIPs and attendees of the
summit. So that's all from me.
Hopefully that gives you an idea of, you know, who OS are and what our role is really in terms
of public sector and national security and resilience for a data perspective,
services, technical support, and I guess most most importantly,
mapping for emergency service.
Um, so again, we'd love to engage if we've not already, please do get in touch with the
colleagues in the room or my email address is on the at the start of this slide deck.
But without further ado, I'm gonna hand you over to my colleague,
Rick, over to you.
Thanks, Matt. Um, so yeah, so Matt was talking generally
about sort of ordinance survey and some of the things that we do with ordinance survey mapping.
And what I wanted to talk about now is a very specific data set that was heavily used in the
pandemic response that comes out of a partnership between Landmark and OS.
So it's a joint venture product, so.
OS are our partners, we set this up back in 2001, um,
but all the work is done by my colleagues and my team down in Exeter.
So it's the points of interest data set and that takes a whole raft of sources of
information from 150 odd different sort of suppliers into the data and we have a database
of about 8 million. We report on 3.5 million and this tells you
sort of. Everything from cattle grids to convenience
stores, from schools to hospitals to warehouses to pharmacies,
and that's been in operation since 2001 and is used heavily in resilience and central
government planning and police on the ground and emergency services,
local authorities, etc.
Everything is linked to the OS data that that Matt was talking about,
so it combines with OS mapping, it combines with the er er PSGA information,
everything that you would want in, in the data.
And what happened when the pandemic struck back in the early part of 2020,
and in fact I was in a meeting with the Public Health England in Port and Down at the point at
which we switched to allowing the data into the mapping for emergencies.
PHE have been using the data and for many years, and suddenly we said,
we agreed with OS, we agreed with the Geospatial commission and central government.
To make this data available under the pango under the mapping for emergencies,
and the beauty of that is it released all this information, 3.5 million geolocated
accurately positioned facilities into a central depository.
And because it was in the mapping for emergencies, there was no question oversharing
protocols. It was all centrally organised,
everybody could use it, um, and.
One of the things that became very clear was that it went into defence,
who had been using the data say for some time, um, and they put that into.
The central depository in order to make it available for responders on the ground.
And by combining the data that that is held within the planning,
the uh POI data.
You could because everything is accurately positioned with everything,
with every other feature with NOS, you could combine that with ordinance survey data with
ONS output, and you could combine it with local information that might be housed by,
you know, known by resilience team or response team.
And that way you could look at whether there is where the pharmacies are,
where the vulnerable communities are, how they interconnect, whether you can get access within
a certain radius, what the root structure was, we have national highways using the data,
we had, as I say, defence and and local resilience organisations using the data in
order to make certain that supply chains were kept going.
The supermarket shelves were kept stocked and we could go forward from there.
The DGC, which is the Central Geographic centre for the Ministry of defence,
again who had worked with this data for some time, because of the mapping for emergencies
were able to release the information into the National centre for Geospatial Intelligence.
So this is a single database depository that could then feed out into emergency responders
and resilience teams on the ground.
And at the height of the pandemic planning period in sort of April 2020.
That that database was being hit by about 8000 responses per month
and for Over 600 different response teams, so that's just the the
central teams that were then feeding that out because you could connect in via web mapping
services. Everything was connecting into the unique
property reference number and the unique uh road network,
the USRN, all coming from OS mapping.
You could do the planning using that database.
DGC also use the data to locate test centres. They used it,
they continue to use it for um vaccine centres and again,
by using that combining with with highways and road network,
we can look at seeing, making certain that.
Everyone can get to the vaccine centres, everyone can get to supply chains.
And that is even continuing on.
So we're now seeing even very recently with the fuel crisis and the supply chain sort of
issues. I had the the defence on the on the call
working with OS looking at how they would be able to roll out their teams in order to make
certain that the the fuel was getting to where it needed to get.
Because the POI data was made available in the mapping for emergencies,
it was freely available.
It doesn't sit within the public sector geospatial agreement,
and it no longer sits within the mapping for emergencies agreement that ended in in spring
this year, but it is a central depository, as I say, it is used by.
Many parts of central government, many police authorities, British Transport Police,
Met Police, and Gloucester police all make use of the data,
for example, and various private sector organisations will also make use of the data,
but it's used heavily within the public sector for planning for for making use.
So when you accurately need to know where pharmacies are,
where supermarkets are, where warehouses are.
That data set is an incredibly rich and diverse data set,
um, and as I say, it's being heavily used.
Both in the pandemic and for the recovery ahead.
So if you're interested in learning more about that particular data set or how it can interact
with ordinance survey mapping or any of the ordinance survey sort of suite of products and
how it interconnects with other information you might have,
we're happy to talk.
Uh, my colleagues and I at Landmark work on that all the time,
and Matt at OS and our partners at OS are heavily involved in building and
enriching that data set.
So that was just trying to give you a quick run through of a particular area that was used
within the pandemic, um, but we're open for questions and anything on mapping related,
that's what we're about. Thank you.
It's like we lost the mic I'm back.
Thank you, Rick, thank you Rick.
Have we got any questions, any questions?
I'll throw the floor open floor open.
Everyone's very quiet.
It's alright, just see I've just lost, can we just check online as well,
because I've just lost the online connection, it er dropped out.
Have we got anything online?
No.
Just thinking, Matt, uh, you're sitting in the background, have you got anything else you'd
just like to add?
You're sitting there very patiently.
No, not from my perspective, again, we're really keen to engage both from a PSJ or
landmark perspective, um, so please do get in touch.
We just said, I just want one thing? I mean,
when we did a similar presentation to this back for the March event,
the online event, and one of the questions that came up was integrating the points of interest
data and some of the other data with kind of um.
Looking at 3D modelling.
So when a responder goes into a A block of flats or a supermarket,
a shopping centre or somewhere where there are multiple use cases and and that's an area where
we're looking at. I mean what we do with the point of interest
rate currently is it it's all stacked to a central point.
So if somebody says to us, um, and we have had this with questions that we,
there's been an incident outside the McDonald's in Victoria.
Station. Now Victoria Station's a very large sites,
and so it's positioning those features within a larger geography,
and that's an area we're looking at and we have been looking at on health provision,
for example, when you're looking at a major site like a training hospital,
a Saint George's.
West London has multiple features and you don't want to direct everyone to go through A&E
when they might be dealing with mental health or they might be dealing with a blood
transfusion or they might be dealing with maternity.
So it's making certain it's widening out the idea of geography both on a localised level
as well as in a national level, and that's part of what we'll be working on going forward.
OK, I, I've just got a quick one for Matt probably because he's sitting,
again, sitting patiently online.
You showed about some of the capabilities and you're saying about um working from home and uh
police officers actually accessing it and planning.
Is that capability available to all the emergency services,
you know, I'm, I'm from an ambulance background, and if so,
are they all utilising that currently?
Yeah, good question, Chris. So I guess the the particular deliverables you
saw from a G7 perspective, when we have kind of major events,
OS will venture into some of that bespoke capture.
So the 3D mesh that you saw there was specifically captured for that event due to the
high profile nature of it, the number of responders both locally and centrally,
who'll be doing it. So, I guess from that perspective it is and is
and was being well used outside of that event, when we consider PSGA deliverables,
you know, they are also being fairly heavily used, maybe not to the extent of a 3D mesh
model because they don't exist, of course, for all, all of GB and they are again put together
on a bespoke basis. But, you know, across the board when we
consider our relationships with those.
Um, services, and and blue light services in particular, you know,
OS data and our, our partner communities data set are being quite heavily used,
which it is great to see, uh, you know, to improve emergency response.
OK, thanks Matt, um, I'll give you a fine opportunity for any questions.
Uh, no, in that case, thank you very much, Matt, thanks very much,
Rick. If we could just show appreciation please.
Thanks. OK.