Building trust in your geospatial data

The OS Data Hub gives Public Sector Geospatial Agreement members access to quality authoritative national coverage geospatial data. How can you use the OS Data Hub APIs to ensure the quality of your organisations data for delivering public services?

Data continues to become ever more prevalent and in demand across the public sector for delivering services. It is evident that location or the geospatial data is critical, and this is summarised by the phrase “everything happens somewhere”. When using geospatial data for delivering public services it is important that geospatial data is good quality i.e. complete, unique, consistent, timely, valid and accurate (as defined by the Data Management Association (DAMA) data quality dimensions).

When using geospatial data for decision making, the data being used can often be described as the Authoritative Data. Authoritative Data is not to be mistaken for “important data” or the “well known data”, it has a specific definition. Authoritative data can be defined as:

“Data provided by or on behalf of a public body (authority) which has an official mandate to provide and sustain it, that is based on a set of criteria to ensure (inter alia) known data quality, and that is required to be used or aimed towards extensive use and reuse within the public sector and society as a whole”. (Crompvoets et al. 2019)

Authoritative geospatial data underpins public services across infrastructure, transport, housing and local planning, environment, public health and emergency response.