If you’re headed anywhere in Great Britain – up a Hebridean mountain, perhaps, or down an obscure alleyway deep in London’s East End – then the hardworking mapmakers at the Ordnance Survey (OS) are guaranteed to know the way. Founded in 1791, to this day, the OS remains the custodian of the national map of Britain – not, since 1924, the island of Ireland, or the Isle of Man (usually), but the half billion features of the long, craggy, most populated archipelago in the UK.
Approximately 20,000 changes are made to this map daily, thanks in part to a combination of satellite and aerial photos, as well as laser scans taken annually. That information, explains the OS’s consulting lead Tim Chilton, is now combined with other datasets to provide an ever-larger set of tools for both personal and commercial use. It’s Chilton’s job, he explains, to find new customers for that data and to help cultivate new commercial applications.
For example, charities are using the data to research the postcode lottery for healthcare to lobby the government for reform. On the commercial side, the transport and logistics sector could use OS geospatial data to optimise planning applications or encourage the adoption of electric vehicles through the savvy distribution of charging points. The financial sector also stands to benefit, with insurers more easily mapping areas subject to heightened risk of flooding or hotspots for fraudulent claims.
Roofing has turned out to be another area of expertise – or, rather, knowing the precise tilt and coordinates of some 40m slate, brick and concrete roofs throughout Great Britain. That project, explains Chilton, originated from a contract with the UK government to improve the accessibility and usability of geospatial data for 6,500 public sector organisations. The result was ‘Slopey Roofs,’ a collection of open datasets the OS has released on Snowflake Marketplace to not allow third-party providers to launch their own roof-related products and services, but also to integrate solar panel mapping functionality to supercharge the rollout of these carbon-killing devices.
According to the resulting data, approximately 1.3m buildings in Britain – around 5% of the total – have solar panels. Snowflake takes this data and combines it with findings from the Met Office, including information on the sun’s position at specific times and dates, to provide users with the Slopey Roofs tool for assessing the efficiency of roofs for solar panel installation. It achieves this, in part, by allowing users to customise hypothetical solar panel direction and elevation angles.
“This gives a powerful impetus to the government’s pursuit of clean energy, and provides a lot of support for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNEZ),” says Chilton. “We are working on their heatzone mapping model right now, and our buildings data is central to that initiative. Slopey Roofs is a good but small example of the work that is needed in the pursuit of net zero, and OS data is at the heart of those efforts.”
The UK government’s target of achieving 95% clean electricity by 2030 is ambitious, and the new state-owned entity Great British Energy is set to shell out £180m for solar panels among schools and hospitals across the country. Tools like Slopey Roofs could play a key role in enabling both public and private sector users to make better data-driven decisions.
“Our data is keeping pace with buildings to answer modern questions about heating efficiency and more, and we hope to create more demonstrators on these data platforms,” Chilton explains. “Slopey Roofs will be a Snowflake quickstart, and it is just a few hundred lines of Python, so the code can easily be amended. It could, for example, be a customer map for e-commerce.”
The partnership also lowers the barrier to entry for potential users, Chilton continues, getting a greater number of potential users immersed into the OS’s data more quickly. “And that process is less complex than people might have thought,” he adds. “The energy use case proves that we can create this kind of tool, and that opens the data up to other sectors by showcasing the simplicity of creating something useful.”
A future of blue slopey roofs?
Slopey Roofs isn’t really for members of the general public, apart from those with a penchant for data analysis who spend most of their working day on associated databases. However, Chilton hopes that for everyone else, it’ll move the discussion forward on how to build tools using the OS’s data.
“Our data set is huge and comprehensive, and every column has some value for some customers,” he adds. “There are some fee-paying customers, including big corporations, with which we have long-term relationships, but we can 10x that on short-term relationships because there is a huge raft of people out there who don’t know who we are and don’t know we have this data. The question is how to format it and make it usable for them.”
The real value in Slopey Roofs derives partly from the fact that it provides a real use case – the pursuit of net zero – and makes use of the efforts OS is constantly making to keep its vast repository of geospatial data up-to-date. Beyond that, it provides a valuable learning framework for other government departments working through Snowflake, helps define the parameters of a good working partnership with an external technology provider, and supplies a platform from which to develop more innovative tools.
“There is an established use case that could be more powerful with our new data,” Chilton remarks. “And we have proven that we can do difficult things. Government departments, including HM Land Registry, are going through transformation. We are showing that the complexity of digital transformation comes down over time, hopefully. And now that the Met Office has come in with weather data, we are able to ask where else in government could be a fast follower.”
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