Spatial Information: Powering informed decision-making in an information-rich society
The information under-pinning decision-making is changing. All across the world, the value of 'location' is being recognised as a major contributor to enhancing the accuracy of decision-making. For generations, both the public and the private sector have used revenue, time and cost as basic building blocks on which to make decisions. Now the dimension of 'location' can be added to that list.
It is more than 150 years since a contaminated water pump was identified as the source of a major cholera outbreak in London, England. Dr John Snow illustrated the cause by plotting the locations of cholera deaths on a map which clearly showed a cluster among properties near the pump in Broad Street, Soho. It was an early example of spatial analysis supporting incident detection. However the concept of using location, universally as a key driver to decision-making, was overtaken by the use of financial analysis. It is only in the last five years that 'location' has become more widely used in decision-making.
Ordnance Survey is a household name in England, Scotland and Wales synonymous with mapping every corner of Great Britain. It is embedded within the digital information industry and plays a major part in underpinning decision-making in both the public and private sector in Great Britain.
In addition to traditional paper maps, Ordnance Survey provides definitive and intelligent digital geographic data, benefiting tens of millions of people every day. It is pervasive in crucial public sector activities such as locating suitable derelict sites for house building; planning new access to the countryside; controlling the flow of urban traffic; helping the police detect crime; identifying areas of deprivation and social exclusion; and locating public services more effectively. In the private sector, the uses are perhaps even wider, ranging from customer profiling; calculating insurance premiums for flood-risk properties; under-pinning in car navigation systems and many other mobile applications; to identifying pollution-prone sewers before they pollute.
Together with over 500 private sector partners, Ordnance Survey has taken a positive and proactive position in supporting the widespread adoption and maturing use of spatial information across all sectors of society. Ordnance Survey provides the national consistent maintained georeferencing and geodetic infrastructure for Great Britain. Ordnance Survey partners produce the software solutions that use the spatial information for decision-making.
Spatial information is now acknowledged in Great Britain as becoming increasingly important in today's society. However, increased usage of spatial information requires users to now understand 'the provenance of the content' of that information upon which they are making key decisions; both in terms of how the content was collected, and is now stored and maintained. In Great Britain, the Government has recognised that spatial information is more than geographical information from the National Mapping Agency, Ordnance Survey. It is now recognised that many Departments of State and Local Government create and maintain spatial information and that a coordinated policy to drive increased understanding of the 'content' of the data is required. It is expected that this work will increase the power of informed decision-making in already information-rich public and private sector societies. An update on this work will be provided at the conference.