New national Geospatial Data Management System fully operational at Ordnance Survey

New pioneering system coordinates and controls millions of updates to Great Britain’s national mapping agency and lays the foundation for new Ordnance Survey map products.

CAMBRIDGE, UK, August 17th, 2011 – 1Spatial announced today the successful delivery of the innovative Geospatial Data Management System (GDMS) to Great Britain’s national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, by a consortium led by Intergraph and also including Snowflake Software.  Following successful pre-production trials, the new system achieved a successful ‘Go  Live’ in July and is now in full production mode. To satisfy Ordnance Survey’s operational needs, the system had to meet challenging and exacting requirements for both performance and process control.  Most significantly, the system will ensure consistency between Ordnance Survey products and will enable it to develop new, innovative products to address both the current and future business needs of the organisation.

Ordnance Survey manages the definitive mapping database of the entire natural and built landscape of Great Britain at survey level accuracy. The agency’s national geographic database describes more than 440 million individual features – including every road, building, pillar box and field. Each year, more than one million changes to the landscape of Great Britain need to be measured and assimilated into this database using data sources that include field surveyors, remote sensing commercial data capture companies and other national agencies. This creates a data management task of extraordinary complexity and volume that requires efficient planning, control and processing. The GDMS has been developed to address some 5,000 detailed Ordnance Survey requirements in order to support up to 600 staff and 5,000 update jobs daily, which can involve the retrieval of up to 36 million map feature records and the posting of 300,000 updates.

The solution is the result of close collaboration between the design and test teams of both the consortium and Ordnance Survey. It provides an integrated, enterprise-wide solution for the management, planning, coordination and control of Ordnance Survey’s data capture and production activities, using state-of-the-art software technologies from the three partner companies. As prime contractor, Intergraph delivered job planning and scheduling capabilities using its highly-customisable GeoMedia product suite and integration of third-party technologies from vendors such as Safe Software and PlexityHide.  1Spatial provided the central data model and enterprise rules for maintaining and validating data through Radius Studio.  Snowflake Software provided data extraction and loading via its GO Loader/GO Publisher products. The system uses Oracle for data storage and process orchestration.

Ordnance Survey selected the Intergraph-led team after a rigorous six-month competitive evaluation in 2007. After an exhaustive three-year implementation and test programme, the system passed Final Acceptance Testing at the end of December 2010, coinciding with Ordnance Survey’s relocation to its new head office at Adanac Park in Southampton, England. The GDMS has now been fully integration-tested within Ordnance Survey’s geospatial systems infrastructure, and has been in operational use since early July 2011.

Bob Goodrich, Director of IS, said: “Ordnance Survey continually pushes the barriers of technology, and the GDMS has been another fantastic example of this. By taking best-of-breed technologies from a number of suppliers, and combining them with Ordnance Survey’s deep knowledge and experience of our data, this solution is providing us with a sturdy and effective platform for the future. This will give us the capability to support more flexible and rapid development of new and enhanced products, enable us to increase efficiencies in our production processes, and reduce costs risks associated with an aging IT infrastructure.”

“We are delighted that the GDMS has been proven to meet Ordnance Survey’s needs” said John Graham, President of Intergraph’s Security, Government and Infrastructure division. “IDC commented in 2007: “..if successful the Ordnance Survey’s new geospatial database and data management system will define a best practice for the collection, distribution and use of geospatial data..” We genuinely believe that the Intergraph Consortium GDMS delivery defines best practice in national geospatial data management, and will be a model that other national mapping agencies will now look to as a benchmark in 2011.“