Rick Crowhurst, Landmark Solutions on developments and data at Landmark.

The future of geo is obviously quite a large idea so I thought I’d just concentrate on a little bit of the future of what we’re doing at Landmark with geo and obviously touch on some of the things that are going to impact on us in the near future. Though with Digimap obviously we concentrate on the historical mapping – that’s the thing that we provide currently to Digimap – and this is one of the things that Landmark is most famous for, creating the digital national archive. But, just to point out that we’re not just about historical mapping, and we do deal with a lot of other data – though my area is very much the historical stuff. We have a churn of about 4 million pieces of data running through a month, through the system – so it’s a lot of data going through from almost over 2,000 different suppliers including people like BGS and OS. And though mapping is a key for us – obviously things like the historical town plans which Emma was talking about earlier, will be going into Digimap.

OS were not the only people obviously to map historically – with apologies to our esteemed national provider – they’re not the only people who have mapped over time, so we’ve obviously been collating maps from lots of other sources as well as lots of other data. Though the town plans are very lovely and tell us a lot about what was going on, we also – I’m going to try and flick this one up...if we just customize this show…to get rid of the timings…we’ll leave it like that – these for example are Goad fire insurance plans which were running from the 1900s through to the 1970s. Bearing in mind that we come from an environmental hazard background, these were incredibly useful to us. They took a long time to geocode and georeference because they don’t follow very many set patterns and they come in little snap shots of parts of the country – but they are beautiful maps and the colour is very, very important to us in this case, though we deal with a lot of the historical mapping in black and white and grey scale raster, these colour maps tell us a lot about what was actually going on in the built environment, in that we have details on the actual types of products being used within the building. For us in many ways asbestos was a key one there. Asbestos is shown on those maps, and we actually sat about digitizing off where asbestos was used on these maps over time. So again, a very useful data set for us within our database.

Somebody else who mapped the UK that we have now got our hands on were the Russians. The KGB mapped most of the major conurbations of the UK between the 1920s and 1970s using their own cartographers and surveyors on the ground – otherwise known as spies. We always had that with the people who actually said, ‘Did they get hold of OS maps, did they get hold of MOD photos?’ – No they just had people on the ground. Most of us, if we saw someone with a theodolite making images maps, we wouldn’t go up to them and assume they were going to be sending it back to Joseph Stalin, but they were. One of the beauties of these maps, apart from the fact that it’s all in Russian which luckily being in Exeter and our guys there having great links to the university, we managed to get some translations, which was very important. Predominately they had a key for those features which they were most looking to get hold of. Now obviously they would include government buildings, military establishments, where the radio stations were, where the things that they would want to get. So there was OS leaving off military establishments and government buildings and there was the KGB filming them. The other great thing, I don’t know if you can see the orange lines coming through – we found they got great measurements for roads. Because they were looking for where they could bring armoured vehicles and tanks through. So the measurements of the road structure was great – and we do hold those, we found them very useful for a lot of our… they were a bit of fun as well, and got great publicity for it… but there is some real, very very great detail in there that we could use within our services.

The other things that we are now moving into as we go forward, and what I said to Tom is I’ll just try and use some pretty pictures rather than talk a great deal. We’re now moving into actually doing some 3D modelling of our own and mapping of our own – using with partners in certain areas- Metropix – we’re now doing 3D modelling of floor plans. 2D, 3D and single D if you want. So we can actually look in our – both in terms of our property reporting – as to what floor plans are, what’s going on in a property and its floor space capability. But moving on from that into an area that’s very key for us in the coming year and couple of years in terms of looking at carbon footprint and environmental modelling and climate change modelling. Those are areas we’re very much moving into and those of you who might not be aware – Landmark are one of the providers of environmental performance certificates under the government – the EPC initiatives – so we provide those, we are one of those contractors.

So moving on from the work we’ve been there on EPCs to look at climate change and carbon footprints from properties and obviously for peoples. We’ve also recently started a project which we had a pilot study with the University of Bristol, looking at – again – flooding - but looking at weather modelling, because they have some great weather modelling down in Bristol. Obviously also being in Exeter having some great links with the Met Office also being based down in Exeter. We’re now looking at how that will work, how weather modelling forward and how that impacts with climate change – how that will also affect flood modelling thereafter. So, those areas of weather, flooding, climate, and carbon footprint will definitely be the key parts of our focus for the next sort of, 2 to 5 years. But as we move into this area of, what I suppose they called post neo-geo – whatever that means, I think it means maps actually. We’re going to go back to paper with any luck – but moving into that area not only are we looking at the data itself and what we can do with the data and how we can model the data, but also how we deliver the data. Most of our information – most of our 3D, 2D vector data is available to be used with the likes of Bing, Google maps, as well as OS base, as we move forward. And to look at how we use smart technology – how we deliver to iphone technology and the like - Androids, etc. We obviously have a very large commercial arm that deal with environmental consultants and planning consultants, what they want to be able to do is be out in the field with their phone or their laptop, or their tablet, and actually be able to be out there and model on the ground when they’re looking at things, when they’re taking photos. So I think that’s going to be the way geo is going to go for us, in that its actually sort of freeing it up, and obviously 2010 is going to be very important with the consultation into what’s going to happen with our beloved OS. So that’s going to be very interesting to look forward to and I’m sure OS - Vanessa today will be look forward to talking some more about that.

So that was a quick run through – a few pretty pictures – if you have any more questions you can just grab me or run those through Digimap and they will get to me at some point.