MapThat – Searching for OS Places

By David Crowther

Question:

In MapThat, is it possible to search for an Ordnance Survey Placename?

Answer:

Yes, MapThat is compatible with any number of Address and Placename searches, including searching using your Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) and using OpenStreetMap’s open API.

However, what if you are not a Local Authority with access to a LLPG or you can’t connect to OpenStreetMap’s web services from your servers?

Have you tried the Ordnance Surveys open dataset – OS Placenames?... if not here’s how you can add it as a search into your webGIS e.g. MapThat.

Visit the OS Data Hub – https://osdatahub.os.uk/ - and choose Get free OS OpenData downloads.

There are lots of freely available datasets, so have a little browse!..... when ready search for place names and you will find the OS Open Names dataset.

Choose to download the data –

Selecting GeoPackage as the data format -

This will download as a ZIP file –

Once unzipped you will have a GeoPackage file –

Drag and drop this into your GIS e.g. QGIS –

The OS Place Name dataset covers Great Britain, but in my case, I am only interested in the data in Liverpool so I will add a borough boundary to spatially select against –

In QGIS I used the Select by Location tool to select the OS Place Names within the Liverpool Borough Boundary -

Once selected you can export to a new GeoPackage file, just those records inside the boundary –

To upload this new dataset into my spatial database, I can simply drag and drop the new layer into the preferred database and the upload will start –

… once completed we now have the OS Place Names data for Liverpool in the spatial database -

The Name1 field stores the address values e.g. Postcode, Town Name, Road Name etc… with the LOCAL_TYPE field determining the type of address value e.g. Town name, Road name, Postcode etc….

Road Names:

Postcodes:

Next, we can add this data to MapThat as a Search Layer using the MapThat Admin Forms.

In the first example we will create an OS Place Names Postcode Search Layer – using a where clause to select the records where the LOCAL_TYPE = ‘Postcode’

Choosing the Search Parameters –

Within MapThat users can now use the new OS Place Names Postcode Search – typing a full or partial postcode value the records are filtered as the user types.

In the next example we will create an OS Place Names Road Name Search Layer – using a where clause to select the records where the LOCAL_TYPE = ‘Named Road’

Choosing the Search Parameters –

Within MapThat users can now use the new OS Place Names Road Name Search – typing a full or partial road name value the records are filtered as the user types.

Give this a go yourself, and maybe add a few more OS Place Name searches in for - Towns, Villages and other places names.