Ordnance Survey and planning data
Mike Rose — 2024-04-03
Hi, my name is Mike and I have been working in the Data Standards part of the Digital Planning team since last autumn. I was asked to join to bring my experience and expertise around understanding data collection and creation and what that means for data sharing.
In particular to support in navigating the question of ensuring the right permissions are in place for data sharing through the ‘planning data platform’ lifecycle.
I may have already lost you, so what this really means is…
DLUHC are putting in place processes and technology to produce national level datasets by collating data from local planning authorities (LPAs). What I have been brought in to consider on a dataset by dataset basis is whether there are any intellectual property or legal data sharing type issues in doing this.
This blog post is to introduce myself and this activity that we are undertaking, and also to report back on a meeting we had yesterday with the Ordnance Survey.
The Ordnance Survey are the UK’s national mapping agency, they are a government-owned company and as such they are tasked with generating commercial revenue. Alongside this they have also got the remit to enable the public sector to deliver its requirements which includes sometimes sharing data as open data (which is data that anyone can access, use and share). This requires them to tread a fine line around their data which manifests itself as the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) - which is the data licence between the OS and the whole of the UK public sector.
We know, through the development of the planning data standards, that LPAs use OS data to digitise the locations of specific planning-related features. Examples include listed building outlines, tree preservation order trees and areas and conservation area boundaries.
Some of the LPAs we have been working with have been asking questions around whether they are allowed to share data where they may have created features using OS maps and tools. We think that in most cases this will be fine under the PSGA. However, the PSGA is quite complicated and we do not want the LPAs to just have to take our opinion on this. Hence our meeting with OS yesterday!
The purpose of the meeting was to introduce OS to the platform that we are building and to develop a good working relationship. We want to consider the data that we are developing standards for together, and to make sure that it navigates the PSGA conditions. We can then jointly provide guidance to the LPAs that the data we are asking for is compliant and can be shared.
The meeting was a great kick off, we have agreed that working together in this way is exactly what we need to do and over time we will develop the required assurances for LPAs that all is good with OS licensing!