25 Facts About Ordnance Survey

The Ordnance Survey Board remains accountable to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Ordnance Survey mapping is usually classified as either "large-scale" or "small-scale".

Ordnance Survey maps remain in copyright for fifty years after their publication.

Work was begun in earnest in 1790 under Roy's supervision, when the Board of Ordnance began a national military survey starting with the south coast of England.

For instance, Major Thomas Colby, the longest-serving Director General of Ordnance Survey, walked 586 miles in 22 days on a reconnaissance in 1819.

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Ordnance Survey established a systematic collection of place names, and reorganised the map-making process to produce clear, accurate plans.

In 1855, the Board of Ordnance was abolished and the Ordnance Survey was placed under the War Office together with the Topographical Survey and the Depot of Military Knowledge.

Ordnance Survey developed and exploited photozincography, not only to reduce the costs of map production but to publish facsimiles of nationally important manuscripts.

Ordnance Survey had outgrown its site in the centre of Southampton .

Until 1969, Ordnance Survey largely remained at its Southampton city centre HQ and at temporary buildings in the suburb of Maybush nearby, when a new purpose-built headquarters was opened in Maybush adjacent to the wartime temporary buildings there.

Ordnance Survey became an Executive Agency in 1990, making the organisation independent of ministerial control.

In September 2015 the history of the Ordnance Survey was the subject of a BBC Four TV documentary entitled A Very British Map: The Ordnance Survey Story.

Ordnance Survey supported the launch of the Slow Ways initiative, which encourages users to walk on lesser used paths between UK towns.

Ordnance Survey produces a large range of paper maps and digital mapping products.

Ordnance Survey produces a wide variety of different products aimed at business users, such as utility companies and local authorities.

In 2013, Ordnance Survey released its first official app, OS MapFinder, and has since added three more apps.

Ordnance Survey offers OS Custom Made, a print-on-demand service based on digital raster data that allows a customer to specify the area of the map or maps desired.

Ordnance Survey publishes a quarterly journal, principally for geography teachers, called Mapping News.

Ordnance Survey still has a team of surveyors across Great Britain who visit in person and survey areas that cannot be surveyed using photogrammetric methods and there is an aim of ensuring that any major feature is surveyed within six months of being built.

Ordnance Survey is responsible for a UK-wide network of GPS stations known as "OS Net".

Ordnance Survey still maintains a set of master geodetic reference points to tie the Ordnance Survey geographic datum points to modern measurement systems such as GPS.

Several decades Ordnance Survey has had a research department that is active in several areas of geographical information science, including:.

In 2007 Ordnance Survey were criticised for contracting the public relations company Mandate Communications to understand the dynamics of the free data movement and discover which politicians and advisers continued to support their current policies.

On 1 April 2010 Ordnance Survey released the brand OS OpenData under an attribution-only license compatible with CC-BY.

In mid-2013 Ordnance Survey described an "enhanced" linked-data service with a SPARQL 1.

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