Southern upgrades mapping system

Southern Water has upgraded its mapping data to a full corporate geographical information system using a single repository of spatial data. This has allowed it to take advantage of Ordnance Survey's (OS) flagship, MasterMap. Paul Beauchamp of OS reports


Southern Water is to use Ordnance Survey’s (OS) MasterMap following a company-wide upgrade of its location data and geographical information system (GIS).

The company undertook an exercise to improve the quality and accuracy of its own geographical data based on the OS positional accuracy improvement (PAI) programme.

The programme has given Southern Water, which provides water and sewage services to 4 million people, better and more consistent accuracy in the mapping of rural areas.

And it has improved the relationship between OS 1:2500-scale map data and Southern Water’s own GPS-positioned information.

Marc Hobell, OS’s strategic development manager for the utilities sector says MasterMap data can have long-lasting benefits for Southern Water. “We’ve been very happy to work closely with Southern Water to help them through the PAI process,” he says. “By upgrading from Land-Line to OS MasterMap Topography layer and taking on OS MasterMap ITN Layer, Southern Water will be able to take advantage of the next generation of digital map data to support their asset and resource management.”

The company has more than 13,000km of water mains stretching from Kent to the Isle of Wight. So, maintaining the currency of its geographic data is important. By undertaking the PAI programme, Southern completed a full audit and cleaning of its data.

Peter Brown, Southern Water GIS corporate upgrade project manager says: “What underpinned our direction and strategy was the concept of a single spatial data repository with the appropriate applications all using the same data and one single view of our asset infrastructure.”

OS’s PAI programme has developed to enable the capture of 1:2500-scale data to a greater absolute accuracy than before. This has increased precision in the mapping of rural areas. Improving the positional accuracy of Southern’s data collected against pre-PAI mapping required using OS-supplied vectors, which indicate the direction and extent to which each entity must be shifted to be correctly aligned.

Mark Bell is business analyst for the PAI project at Southern Water. He says: “Our approach enabled us to implement PAI with maximum integrity while it has saved money.

“We had a highly productive team and the capability of the software exceeded our expectations. Ordnance Survey was very supportive and their consultancy team was particularly useful.”

With the completion of its PAI project, Southern Water will switch from Land-Line to OS MasterMap Topography Layer, with subsequent adoption of OS MasterMap Address Layer and Integrated Transport Network (ITN) Layer.

Bell adds: “By switching fully to OS MasterMap we know we are future-proofing our corporate data and we believe we will be the first combined water and sewage utility company to be using OS MasterMap and post-PAI assets in a corporate GIS

environment”.

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