Collecting names from coast to coast

National mapping agency, Ordnance Survey and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency are collaborating on a vernacular geography project, collecting local place names used by people to improve emergency responses.

Ordnance Survey’s Research department have created a new system, FINTAN, which is being trialled in the Maritime and Coastguard Agency Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCCs) at Clyde, Solent, Holyhead and Stornoway. The system allows staff to add local names for beaches, rocks, waterways and other features with local names onto the existing mapping data, something which is of interest and benefit to both organisations and the public. FINTAN includes 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer, 1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster and OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 to form a search facility for the Agency to use. It also permits the use of grid references alongside latitude and longitude – as used by Her Majesty’s Coastguard allowing the other emergency services to use different reference systems for the same location.

The system could provide the answer to a common challenge for Ordnance Survey and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in collecting information on the names people use to describe places that aren’t commonly shown on mapping data or exist within gazetteers. For the Coastguard, a large number of emergency calls are received for incidents located on, or just off the coast of Great Britain and postcodes are not of great use, making locating people a challenge. People will often use nicknames for beaches, rocks and areas that are not captured as official place names on a map, but may be well-known to the locality. So far, the MRCCs have been adding names for off-shore rocks and nicknames for islands – such as Sausage Island (Ynys-las, Gwynedd) and Dell Rock, off Stornoway. As the Coastguard moves towards a national maritime operations centre, a greater emphasis will need to be placed on capturing local knowledge to support emergency response and coordination functions.

Steve Brown, Head of Technical Development at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, said, “As one of the emergency services, we currently operate 18 Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres around the United Kingdom and our Coastguard staff hold an enormous amount of local knowledge, which is often key to emergency response and coordination. As we move towards a national maritime operations centre, we will have a heavier reliance on geographic information and we will need to ensure that we robustly incorporate our local knowledge within the modernised Coastguard organisation.”

“Through FINTAN, Ordnance Survey is enabling Her Majesty’s Coastguard to consistently capture this valuable information and make it available across the whole country, something we’ve not been able to manage previously.”

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Collecting names from coast to coast

National mapping agency, Ordnance Survey and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency are collaborating on a vernacular geography project, collecting local place names used by people to improve emergency responses.

Ordnance Survey’s Research department have created a new system, FINTAN, which is being trialled in the Maritime and Coastguard Agency Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCCs) at Clyde, Solent, Holyhead and Stornoway. The system allows staff to add local names for beaches, rocks, waterways and other features with local names onto the existing mapping data, something which is of interest and benefit to both organisations and the public. FINTAN includes 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer, 1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster and

OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 to form a search facility for the Agency to use. It also permits the use of grid references alongside latitude and longitude – as used by Her Majesty’s Coastguard allowing the other emergency services to use different reference systems for the same location.

The system could provide the answer to a common challenge for Ordnance Survey and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in collecting information on the names people use to describe places that aren’t commonly shown on mapping data or exist within gazetteers. For the Coastguard, a large number of emergency calls are received for incidents located on, or just off the coast of Great Britain and postcodes are not of great use, making locating people a challenge. People will often use nicknames for beaches, rocks and areas that are not captured as official place names on a map, but may be well-known to the locality. So far, the MRCCs have been adding names for off-shore rocks and nicknames for islands – such as Sausage Island (Ynys-las, Gwynedd) and Dell Rock, off Stornoway. As the Coastguard moves towards a national maritime operations centre, a greater emphasis will need to be placed on capturing local knowledge to support emergency response and coordination functions.

Steve Brown, Head of Technical Development at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, said, “As one of the emergency services, we currently operate 18 Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres around the United Kingdom and our Coastguard staff hold an enormous amount of local knowledge, which is often key to emergency response and coordination. As we move towards a national maritime operations centre, we will have a heavier reliance on geographic information and we will need to ensure that we robustly incorporate our local knowledge within the modernised Coastguard organisation.”

“Through FINTAN, Ordnance Survey is enabling Her Majesty’s Coastguard to consistently capture this valuable information and make it available across the whole country, something we’ve not been able to manage previously.”

For Ordnance Survey, the Research department have long recognised the strength of local knowledge and have been investigating the building of an “alternative gazetteer” through crowd-sourcing that references local nicknames and could include, for example, a popular name for a road junction or bridge.      

“With the huge variety of place nicknames that exist, we could never hope to capture them all ourselves,” says Glen Hart, Ordnance Survey’s Head of Research. “Technically, this research goes by the name of vernacular geography, which is looking into which names should be recorded and how best to discover them.

“Projects like this can provide us with useful research data and help organisations like the Maritime and Coastguard Agency when responding to emergency calls. By having a set of ‘unofficial’ names we could help the emergency services quickly locate the right place, and maybe even save lives.” 

The next phase for both organisations is to test and check the added names and to work with local organisations, such as sailing clubs, to see if more coastal knowledge can be gleaned. The Maritime and Coastguard Agency are already pleased with their trial of Ordnance Survey’s FINTAN system and plan to roll it out across all of its Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres over the coming months.

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.

GeoVation winners to tackle Britain’s neighbourhoods

New apps and tools aimed at transforming Britain’s neighbourhoods to be launched with funding from Ordnance Survey.

An idea for a mobile app which would help the public to nominate sites for offenders to work on, has triumphed in Ordnance Survey’s GeoVation Challenge. 

The app called ‘Community Payback Visibility’, by the Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust, would also allow the public to keep tabs on how work on these chosen areas is progressing. The idea was awarded £40,000 by Ordnance Survey so the app can start to be developed. 

As part of the GeoVation Challenge, entrepreneurs from the across the country were tasked with coming up with ideas, using Ordnance Survey mapping information, on how to improve neighbourhoods in Britain for the better. The best ideas were whittled down to just 10 finalists who competed against each other in a Dragon’s Den style Showcase Event at Ordnance Survey’s head office on Wednesday, June 20. 

Three other groups of entrepreneurs were also awarded a £25,000 slice of the total pot of £116,000. These included an app which helps people to report hate crime, a tool which helps residents to survey their area and find new community green spaces, and a tool which links up food enterprises for the benefit of all. This idea also won the £1000 Community prize voted for by the Showcase audience. 

Jason Davies, from the Staffordshire and West Midlands Probation Trust, said: “It is absolutely fantastic to win first prize. This funding will now help us to develop the idea. To win against such other good ideas means a lot to us. We are now really keen to get started as quickly as we can.” 

Community Payback Visibility, would allow people to take a geo-tagged photo of a area and nominate it as an area for Community Payback - unpaid work carried out by offenders on community sentences. 

The probation trust team would then post updates on the nominations as well as how work is progressing on the chosen sites. 

Dr Chris Parker, a GeoVation facilitator, said: “Ten excellent ideas were pitched to the judging panel at the GeoVation Showcase. We believe that these new apps and technologies will go a long way to helping to improve neighbourhoods across Britain. 

“This is a really important challenge. Research shows that many people would like to get involved in contributing to their communities and neighbourhoods, but didn’t know how. We asked entrepreneurs to come up with some ideas, using our data, on how to improve neighbourhoods, addressing anything from crime to community spirit. 

“The funding and support will give these entrepreneurs the chance to get their ideas off the ground and up and running. We also hope that these apps and tools will eventually be able to be scaled up, so that all of Britain can benefit from them.” 

 The other winning ideas which were awarded £25,000 to implement their ideas are: 

Sustaination – food enterprise mapping & communication: By Ed Dowding from Salisbury. It involves networking food enterprises to work more effectively together and promote themselves to their communities. OS OpenData platform helps citizens map food webs, highlighting opportunities for innovation and re-localisation.

Hate Crime Reporting App: By Matthew Green from Birmingham. An idea for a smartphone app designed to help individuals report instances of hate crime. Using OS OpenData, individuals can locate hotspots on Ordnance Survey maps and submit reports of crime to local police and community organisations.

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Ordnance Survey’s new head office wins Sustainable Achievement Award

A Government organisation’s headquarters has scooped a prestigious national development award.    

Ordnance Survey’s head office Explorer House, is one of the most sustainable buildings of its kind in the country. The base for 1 000 staff of Great Britain’s national mapping agency won the Sustainable Achievement Award at The Office Agents Society (OAS) Development Awards at a ceremony in London.

Staff moved into the newly built Explorer House in 2010, immediately cutting the organisation’s carbon footprint by 60%. Explorer House has already received a BREEAM 'excellent' rating – an accolade that applies to buildings with high green credentials.

Every aspect of sustainability has been considered in the construction of the building. The need for artificial light has reduced with large north-facing windows. The temperature inside the building is controlled by an electronic management system ,which opens and closes windows and controls heating and ventilation systems to avoid excessive energy loss and achieve perfect working conditions.

A ground source heat pump provides heat to the building, food waste is composted and even the toilets are flushed with harvested rainwater.

The Development Awards are an annual celebration of the industry’s highest achievers and so Explorer House and Kier Property, the building’s developer, were up against some stiff competition.

Greg Tumilty, Building and Property Services Manager at Ordnance Survey, said: “We are obviously delighted to be recognised, especially for the sustainable achievement awards. We worked hard to ensure that the building was as sustainable as possible for the long term. Given Ordnance Survey has been collecting data for over 220 years, we want to make sure that the long term prospects for the building and the organisation are as positive as they can be.”

Adam Vine, Associate Director at Kier Property, said: “On this project it was very important to consider the environmental issues and to take steps to maximise the opportunities to create a building which had a sustainable future and a positive impact on the local community as well as the existing workforce.”

The judges commented that Explorer House was a great example of a developer working with a local occupier for a long-term solution that addresses the social, environmental and economic inputs required for a truly sustainable solution.

For more information from Ordnance Survey, please contact:

Melanie Osborne – Corporate Communications Manager on 023 8005 5062 or melanie.osborne@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

Oliver Harry – Senior Press Officer on 023 8005 5098 or oliver.harry@ordnancesurvey.co.uk

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.

Everything happens somewhere - Location 2012 conference opens for registrations

IT and business-people looking to grow their businesses have been challenged to bring their imagination to an event focusing on providing services and making a profit from location data and mapping. Based on the idea that everything happens somewhere, the conference will look at how business can profit from location information from selling services to customers to making more cost-efficient and effective business decisions.

Co-ordinated by the national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, the one-day conference will bring together a wide range of location data service providers and others in the IT and GIS (Geographical Information System) world to show how businesses can make profitable business decisions using geographic information.

The event called ‘Location 2012 – Profit from mapping and location data’ will be held on Tuesday 8 May at the Royal Berkshire Conference Centre near Reading. Interested business people can find out more and register for free at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/location2102

Location 2012 is a unique opportunity for businesses to discover how to take the most detailed, accurate and up-to-date location data available and use it to deliver new services and new value to customers.

Visionary speakers from Microsoft, Experian, Ordnance Survey and others will show how major corporations have already gained significant competitive advantage by using Location Intelligence.

For more information visit www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/location2102

The conference takes place on Tuesday 8th May at the Royal Berkshire conference centre. Registration and attendance by delegates is free. The event will run from 9.00am – 5.00pm

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.