What open geospatial datasets are useful for utility companies?

There’s a huge amount of open geospatial data available to UK utility companies. The most useful datasets are those that add context to a network: what surrounds an asset, what could threaten it, who and what it serves, and how conditions may change.

• Environmental data can help utilities understand risks around their infrastructure. Flooding, rivers and other inland waters, land cover and environmental designations can all influence network planning, maintenance and resilience.

• Transport data adds another important layer. Road and transport networks can help with access planning, field operations and understanding how infrastructure relates to the routes around it.

• Geological and elevation data can provide information about the physical landscape. Terrain, ground conditions and geology may be relevant when assessing new infrastructure, while elevation data can help teams understand slope, drainage and areas potentially exposed to environmental risk.

• Administrative and societal datasets provide a different kind of context. Boundaries, population information and other demographic data can help utilities understand the communities served by their networks and support analysis of demand, investment and potential disruption.

There are also open datasets covering areas such as agriculture, buildings, planning, health and economic activity – it all comes down to which questions are being asked. A network planner considering a new route will need a different combination of data from a resilience team assessing assets exposed to flooding.

The difficulty is, ‘open’ doesn’t mean effortless. Individual datasets come from different publishers, change at different times and need to be downloaded, checked, processed and updated before they’re useful alongside existing GIS data. Open, can be incredibly valuable. It’s not a panacea.

Idox Geospatial's theMapCloud addresses the management problem by bringing together more than 300 curated UK open datasets across environment, inland waters, transportation, geoscience, societal information and other themes. They’re hosted and maintained by Idox Geospatial and can be accessed through WMS, WMTS or WFS using a single API key. For utility teams using open data at scale, that means more time analysing the information and less time finding, preparing and maintaining it.

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