Ordnance Survey is a government Trading Fund. That is to say, we are a government department, and are required to generate revenue from our activities that covers our costs, and additionally generates a small return on capital employed.
In Great Britain our experience is that this user-pays model offers a sustainable means to invest in and develop our geographic information for the benefit of good governance, the citizen, and business. Our experience shows paying customers to be more demanding - and deservedly so - which ensures that we respond to their needs and deliver data fit for their particular purpose.
In addition we have a National Interest Mapping Services Agreement (NIMSA) – an agreement with government to fund specific mapping activities that are vital to the national interest but which cannot be justified on purely commercial grounds. They include such tasks as keeping the most detailed mapping of remote areas up-to-date – areas where such mapping is vital for public administration but where there is little other demand. This work is carried out on a not-for-profit basis.
-- Intellectual Property --
A central issue in maintaining our national geographic information assets is protecting the Intellectual Property interests in that information. Copyright legislation allows us to do that, and our revenue is built upon the activity of issuing licences to our customers to use those information assets. We are pleased to have been accredited by the HMSO Information Fair Trader scheme.
-- Address data --
Address data is an essential geographic dataset in modern Britain. Ordnance Survey address products provide precise coordinates for more than 26 million residential and commercial properties in Great Britain.
Our address data originates from the Royal Mail's postcode address file (PAF®). Ordnance Survey uses on-the-ground GPS survey, aerial imagery and various other techniques to establish precise coordinates for each address and match this to the property on the map – effectively joining up postal and topographic geography, creating a fixed link between the property and its address.
One of the important contributions of Gaelic has been to the placenames of Scotland. Ordnance Survey’s role is to portray these names in our data and maps, as with all other placenames.
Ordnance Survey make a clear distinction between the depiction of names, which is our responsibility, and determining the correct name which falls to others. Ordnance Survey surveyors work with local residents, signage, the local authority and others as appropriate to find out the correct name of a natural or man-made feature, and how that name should be spelt. To help with this work we have a Gaelic Names Policy, and we work closely with experts in Gaelic to help us depict this valuable Scottish cultural asset correctly.
