UK, 6 February 2007 – Ordnance Survey has announced the signing of a contract securing the use of OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 for two of the UK’s leading water suppliers.
Bristol Water and Wessex Water, which between them serve over 3.5 million people, have access to the most detailed and accurate spatial addressing information in the country, allowing them to better track their assets and provide improved customer service.
With approaching 29 million addresses, OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 builds upon the foundation of its predecessor, OS MasterMap Address Layer. It not only features all Royal Mail’s postal addresses but also alternative addresses and over 1.5 million objects without a postal address.
By taking advantage of this huge and previously unavailable depth of information, Bristol Water and Wessex Water have been able to verify the whereabouts of thousands of properties that receive their services but for which they had insufficient addressing data.
Places without an address can include locations as diverse as churches to public toilets. With the added knowledge provided by OS MasterMap Address Layer 2, both water suppliers can ensure that addresses that would have otherwise not been registered are fairly billed for the water they receive.
Likewise for their customers, OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 allows for the speedier location and resolution of faults. The enriched data is fully integrated with unique identifiers, or TOIDs, which are then linked to the customers’ records, enabling easier and quicker identification.
OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 also includes over 150,000 residential premises that have multiple occupancies but only a single postal address. They include separate flats within a house where the postman can only get to one front door. As they do not fall within Royal Mail’s definition of a delivery point, other spatial address datasets may fail to capture them.
