How can utilities combine Ordnance Survey data with open datasets?

Ordnance Survey data provides utilities with an authoritative foundation for understanding networks, assets, properties and infrastructure. But open datasets can add valuable insights about conditions, communities and risks surrounding them. Used together, they allow utilities to ask far more useful questions of location.

OS data might identify buildings, addresses, roads, land or water features around an electricity substation, for example. But open flood data can add information about its exposure to flooding. Geological data might reveal relevant ground conditions, while demographic information can help indicate the communities that could be affected by disruption.

The same principle can be applied across utility operations.

• For network planning, OS building, address and transport information can be combined with population, planning or environmental data to understand where demand may change and where infrastructure could face constraints.

• For asset management, authoritative mapping can provide the physical context around network assets, while open data adds information about flooding, geology, land cover and other external factors.

• For resilience planning, different datasets can be layered together to identify where critical infrastructure and areas of environmental risk coincide – helping teams prioritise where further investigation or investment may be needed.

The Ordnance Survey National Geographic Database (OS NGD) strengthens the foundation for this type of analysis by providing detailed, interconnected information about buildings, land, transport, water and addresses. The challenge is then finding and maintaining the additional open datasets needed to enrich it.

That said, open data is free to access, but using it at scale still takes work, time, and a certain amount of expertise – experience helps. Different publishers use different formats and update schedules, and individual datasets need to be found, prepared and maintained before they can become a dependable part of a GIS workflow.

Tools like Idox Geospatial's theMapCloud brings together more than 300 curated open datasets and makes them available through WMS, WMTS and WFS. Used alongside OS NGD and other authoritative OS datasets, it gives utility teams a practical way to build a richer geographic picture – combining a dependable view of what and where with additional evidence about risk, environment and the communities their networks serve.

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