A Review of GeoSpatial Data Sources

Figure 1: MasterMap Topography Layer data

To determine which data sources could, potentially, be used to provide contextual information for crime analysis, we produced a review into a large number of geospatial data sources. The full review is available as an on-line document, this post will summarise our findings.

We looked at a range of data sources, including those available as part of the data.gov scheme, those produced by LandMap and the numerous Ordnance Survey (OS) datasets (some of which are publicly available and others which have restrictive licenses).

Figure 2: An example of OSM data (source).

The most useful data sets that we identified were two OS MasterMap products called the 'Integrated Transport Network' (a road network) and the 'Topography Layer' (which contains land and building features). Figure 1 provides an example of the Topography Layer.

In addition, we identified OpenStreetMap (OSM) data as an alternative resource for road network data (see Figure 2). OSM has the advantage of being publicly available.