{{Unreferenced, date=April 2021 Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) was the official mapping agency of

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label=Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is #Descriptions, variously described as ...

. The agency ceased to exist separately on 1 April 2008 when it became part of Land and Property Services, an

executive agency An executive agency is a part of a government department that is treated as managerially and budgetarily separate, to carry out some part of the executive functions of the United Kingdom government, Scottish Government, Welsh Government or N ...

of the

Department of Finance and Personnel The Department of Finance (DoF, ga, An Roinn Airgeadais, Ulster-Scots: ''Männystrie o Siller'') is a devolved Northern Ireland government department in the Northern Ireland Executive. The minister with overall responsibility for the departme ...

, along with the

Rate Collection Agency Rate or rates may refer to: Finance * Rates (tax), a type of taxation system in the United Kingdom used to fund local government * Exchange rate, rate at which one currency will be exchanged for another Mathematics and science * Rate (mathema ...

, the

Valuation and Lands Agency Valuation may refer to: Economics *Valuation (finance), the determination of the economic value of an asset or liability **Real estate appraisal, sometimes called ''property valuation'' (especially in British English), the appraisal of land or bui ...

, and the Land Registry.

Description

It was an Executive Agency within the

Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure The Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL), translated in Irish as and in Ulster-Scots as , was a devolved government department in the Northern Ireland Executive. The minister with overall responsibility for the department was the ...

in the

Northern Ireland Executive The Northern Ireland Executive is the devolved government of Northern Ireland, an administrative branch of the legislature – the Northern Ireland Assembly. It is answerable to the assembly and was initially established according to the ...

. The Ordnance Surveys of Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland share a common heritage: the British

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

(OS) ceased to map

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the s ...

just before the creation of the

Irish Free State The Irish Free State ( ga, Saorstát Éireann, , ; 6 December 192229 December 1937) was a state established in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. The treaty ended the three-year Irish War of Independence between ...

in 1922 (the

Partition of Ireland The partition of Ireland ( ga, críochdheighilt na hÉireann) was the process by which the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland divided Ireland into two self-governing polities: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. ...

having already taken place in May 1921 with the creation of

). The new Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) officially came into existence on 1 January 1922, while the new

Ordnance Survey of Ireland Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI; ga, Suirbhéireacht Ordanáis Éireann) is the national mapping agency of Ireland. It was established on 4 March 2002 as a body corporate. It is the successor to the former Ordnance Survey of Ireland. It and the ...

(OSI) came into being slightly later, on 1 April 1922.

Products

The vast majority of OSNI's income came from the licensing of its digital mapping data, which, because of the long history of mapping in Ireland (see

) is amongst the most detailed and comprehensive in the world. Digital products range from the Large Scale (1:1250 urban and 1:2500 rural)

vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

database, 1:10,000 raster mapping derived automatically from the L/S vector, 1:50,000 and 1:250,00 vectors, 1;10,000

orthophotography An orthophoto, orthophotograph, orthoimage or orthoimagery is an aerial photograph or satellite imagery geometrically corrected ("orthorectified") such that the scale is uniform: the photo or image follows a given map projection. Unlike an ...

, 1:25,000 leisure maps, the 1:50,000 raster series, 1:250,000 Ireland North raster, street maps of the main conurbations, as well as paper derivatives of all the raster products. In 2005 OSNI began, with the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), to digitise the complete set of historical maps dating back to the 1830s. (The earliest comprehensive and accurately surveyed large scale mapping in the world). These are being georectified to match modern mapping projections and are being annotated with points of interest from PRONI's archives. OSNI also maintained the UK's only common address database, Pointer, which cross matches and validates the address data from the

Royal Mail , kw, Postya Riel, ga, An Post Ríoga , logo = Royal Mail.svg , logo_size = 250px , type = Public limited company , traded_as = , foundation = , founder = Henry VIII , location = London, England, UK , key_people = * Keith Williams ...

, OSNI and local authorities, and georeferences each address, as well as giving it a unique identifier. This allows spatial interrogation by customers of the >800,000 addresses in NI using computerised

Geographic Information Systems A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a ...

(GIS) combined with digital mapping and the customer's own data. Supporting the interconnectivity of Geographical Information (GI) for the benefit of the Northern Ireland economy, society and administration was OSNI's primary purpose. In support of this, OSNI also provides the secretariat for Mosaic, the GI strategy for Northern Ireland, which is the first such strategy to be implemented in the UK. In support of Mosaic, OSNI is currently (2006) building a GeoHub for the region, which will be able to host and connect to spatial data from multiple sources, permit a metadata (data about the data) search and, using thin client browser applications, via the Internet, permit multiple data layers to be interrogated, connected, analysed, licensed, downloaded, uploaded and updated. Starting in Spring 2006, OSNI's own full product range is available via a map-enabled e-commerce website at www.osni.gov.uk OSNI's surveying technology is based on both

photogrammetry Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant ima ...

and ground survey using total station electronic

theodolite A theodolite () is a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. The traditional use has been for land surveying, but it is also used extensively for building and ...

s in combination with pen (tablet) computers, so that the data is updated directly into the digital format. The photogrammetry (using flight-derived stereo imagery at high resolution) is also used to maintain height models of the

topography Topography is the study of the forms and features of land surfaces. The topography of an area may refer to the land forms and features themselves, or a description or depiction in maps. Topography is a field of geoscience and planetary sc ...

(Digital Terrain Model or DTM).

Computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consist ...

permits the draping of

aerial photography Aerial photography (or airborne imagery) is the taking of photographs from an aircraft or other airborne platforms. When taking motion pictures, it is also known as aerial videography. Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wing airc ...

and/or mapping over such models for the purposes of fly-through or drive-through 3D visualisations. OSNI's

Geodesy Geodesy ( ) is the Earth science of accurately measuring and understanding Earth's figure (geometric shape and size), orientation in space, and gravity. The field also incorporates studies of how these properties change over time and equival ...

section maintains the positional reference system to millimetre precision and OSNI's ground stations allow high accuracy use of the GPS system.

External links

Official website
Geography of Northern Ireland Northern Ireland Executive National mapping agencies Ordnance Survey

Description

Products

See also

External links