Northumberland PRoWdly presents

Northumberland County Council set up a project to merge their Public Rights of Way (PRoW) network with the LSG network in order to provide cashable time savings and reduce errors.

They did so by automating wherever possible, all the while maintaining synchronicity between the streets gazetteer and the Local Land and Property Gazetteer.

The project started after the Local Street Gazetteer (LSG) team had meetings with the PRoW team, initially asking them if they would be interested in using their gazetteer management system as their management tool. Doing so would provide them with mobile working, Streetworks Integration and integration with the council’s call centre, none of which they currently had.

Aspirations for this merging included:

• automation wherever possible

• maintaining the definitive map geometry

• maintaining full synchronicity between LSG and LLPG

• creating PRoW data in accordance with the data compliance guidance

• making the process portable so that it could be applied to any dataset and not tied into just the LSG systems.

How the project was carried out

Because these were two datasets from different departments, a bit of sanity checking was done before the data was processed. This was done by identifying overlaps or anomalies between the two; only by doing this first would there be the best chance of success.

Software was written that took the PRoW network and the LSG data, and merged both these sets of data in order to create a new LSG. This was then passed to GeoPlace to check that it was truly compliant.

This process also created the data to update the LLPG, so that the two systems would remain 100% matched, all done without the LLPG team having to update manually.

Outcomes

The main outcome is that Northumberland County Council now has the PRoW network sitting within their LSG, and are now receiving Streetworks notices on the PRoW network that are helping to control works on the PRoW.

This method is completely repeatable and could be used for other organisations’ data. As long as the data is in a spatial form, or accessible as xy coordinates, this method could take in the data and produce a BS7666 compliant gazetteer update.

The next task is to get the council’s countryside teams using the same system as their management tool. Doing so will afford them many of the benefits now experienced by the PRoW team, which include links to the call centre and highways.

Key benefits

• enables the PRoW network to be made available to public and utilities in a standard format that can be used countywide

• the council’s street and address information is at an even higher standard

• approximately 2880 man hours have been saved through automation, producing efficiency savings of between £17,510 and £28,800

• LSG / Streetworks / utilities now have access to the PRoW network

• street count increased from 12,867 at start of project to 22,317