Named Features
The OS National Geographic Database (NGD) Named Features Collection gives you access to the most current and comprehensive list of names of features and places of geographic significance captured by Ordnance Survey. The geographical names assigned to named features in this collection are defined as location identifiers for named locations in the real world, such as cities, towns, beaches and reservoirs. The collection enables you to perform quick and accurate gazetteer searches as well as high-level visualisation and spatial analysis of named features and places.
The Named Features Collection now includes access to Named Road Junction, which provides a list of named intersections between roads at a junction or roundabout. The intersection may be numbered, have an official name, or be assigned a modelled name based on the named of the intersecting roads.
Collection applications
The OS NGD Named Features Collection allows you to:
Ensure your features and place name data is always up to date with up to daily updates.
Quickly find named locations, such as regions, settlements, areas of water, or beaches.
Look up any places or roads with an alternative language name as the collection contains place name data in English, Welsh and Scots / Gaelic.
Calculate the number of addresses in a given settlement when used alongside the OS NGD Address Theme.
Visualise areas of interest.
Understand the extent of named settlements (including city centres, towns, villages, hamlets, etc.) using the polygon data available within the new Named Area Feature Type.
Named Road Junctions provides an understanding of where there are intersecting roads.
Get accurate location information on intersecting roads when using Named Road Junctions for tasks such as recording, reporting and incident logging.
Named Road Junctions includes the names and/or numbers of roads intersecting a named or numbered road junction.
Please note that the depiction of settlement boundaries in the Named Area Feature Type is an OS geographic depiction of the extent of settlements and should not be mistaken for official administrative or electoral boundaries; we recommend using the OS NGD Boundaries Collection if you require a definitive dataset of administrative and electoral boundaries for your area of interest.
Key elements
Up to daily updates to data.
Plug and play – the data is simple and quick to implement as you don't need to pre-process it before you use it.
Rich attribution ensures the data is straightforward to navigate and query.
Persistent unique identifiers with lifecycle information.
In addition to being represented as a point, every named feature will now also be represented as a polygon in the new Named Area Feature Type. Geometry will be available for these polygons, giving you a granular level of detail and a more accurate representation of the spatial extent of named features, such as settlements.
The new Extent Definition attribute gives you access to automatically derived indicative polygon extents for named landform features, such as hills, mountains and areas of woodland. You can use this attribute to analyse how the data has been generated and make informed decisions when implementing the data into your solutions.
Enhanced locality / settlement and place names due to improved classifications and definitions.
Where available, useful links are provided to third-party databases (for example, DBpedia and GeoNames.org) to let you easily gain more information about a named settlement.
Coverage
Great Britain.
Default coordinate reference system
British National Grid (EPSG: 27700).
Temporal filtering
The earliest date on which you can request a one-off snapshot of a date in the past for data in this collection is noted at the top of the individual feature type pages.
Supply formats
GeoPackage, CSV (comma-separated values), GeoJSON or vector tiles (the latter format is only available for one feature type in the collection: Named Point).
Supply mechanism
Accessed through the OS Data Hub via:
OS Select+Build
OS NGD API – Features
OS NGD API – Tiles (only available for one feature type in the collection: Named Point)
Using our data
Included in the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) – therefore, it's free at point of use for Public Sector organisations.
Available to OS Partners for commercial resell in your solutions.
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