A future vision for database driven cartography at the Ordnance Survey @ The ESRI European User Conference 2005

1. The cartographic vision
Ed Parsons <ed.parsons@ordnancesurvey.co.uk>
Chief Technology Officer
October 2005

2. Ordnance Survey - key facts
There is much more to Ordnance Survey than you might think...
 Market leader with more than 200 years of mapping expertise
 Data underpins around 10% of Great Britain's economic
activity
 Financed through data licensing rather than direct funding
from taxpayers
 More than 50% trading revenue comes from non-public sector
customers
 At the forefront of the drive to provide intelligent geographical
information
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3. Where we are
today ...
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5. Document centric cartography
5

6. Flowline reversal
1980-2000
2000+
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7. Where we are
going ...
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8. Database centric cartography
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9. Database centric cartography -
Ed’s golden rule 1
“Separate
representation
Ordnance Survey Land-Line
from data”
Ordnance Survey MasterMap
9

10. Database centric cartography
• Geometry is just an attribute !
• Multiple geometry's associated with a single feature
• Multiple cartographic representations associated with each
feature
Feature Geometry’s Representations
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11. Database centric cartography
Digital Digital
Real World Landscape Cartographic
Models Models
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12. Rebuilding the
Factory
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13. Project “Phoenix”
• Multi-Million Euro investment programme to
allow seamless object editing of core Digital
Landscape Model
• Supports Long Transactions
• Basic service orientated architecture
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14. Job Management Tool
Product
Store
Editor
Transaction Service
Product
Adaptor
Generalisation
Agent
Maia
Core DLM
Archive
Derived
DLM
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15. Cascading DLM’s
DCM Production
DLM 250K ?
DCM Production
DLM 100K ?
DCM Production
on
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DLM 10K ?
ra
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Source DLM
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16. Generalisation
• Modifying the relative location and geometry of features
• A difficult problem to automate
• Current ‘best” solutions rely on AI systems e.g. LaserScan Clarity
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17. Conclusions
• Database centric cartography requires an shift in organisaition
thinking
• Huge benefits from deriving products from a “single source of
truth”
• New ESRI cartographic representation tools are a massive step
forward
• Generalisation is still a difficult problem
• Operational solutions must support interoperability between
systems
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18. Thank you..
presentation available at www.edparsons.com
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