London Borough of Enfield

1Spatial - Redefining spatial data quality

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www.enfield.gov.uk The London Borough of Enfield is the capital’s northernmost borough and, with nearly 280,500 residents, one of its largest. Enfield’s use of geographical information systems (GIS) is very well developed and has recently been extended to over 5000 council staff.

In early 2000 Enfield began a project to establish a corporate GIS and Local Street and Property Gazetteer (LSPG) infrastructure. The creation of the Corporate Spatial Database (CSD) on a dedicated server enabled the Council to store its spatial data in a central repository, allowing MapInfo® TAB files to be easily accessed and viewed using the council’s MapInfo software. In this way, everyone had access to the same and most up-to date geographic data, enabling more efficient and effective decision-making.

“ Radius Topology automatically fixed 94% of the data, flagging up the remaining 6% that required manual intervention. We estimate that using existing tools and methods, it would have taken five years and cost around £100 000 to remedy matters. Using Radius Topology, the actual cost was just £10 000 for 1Spatial’s services. The whole exercise took the team just 23 weeks.

Our investment has helped improve the quality and the value of the services we provide for our residents and businesses. It has provided us with evidence on which to base strategic and operational decisions and has helped us meet the targets set by central government. It has done all of this and saved us time and money, too. ”

The GIS team at Enfield

In April 2004, the council adopted OS MasterMap (OSMM) as the council’s primary 1:1250 scale map base. Initial trials showed inconsistencies between OSMM and the council’s data, showing that extensive work was required before the BLPU data could be useable across the organisation. A manual data cleaning process would take too long, so Enfield chose 1Spatial’s Data Cleaning solution, including Radius Topology to tackle the problem. Radius Topology improves the quality of spatial data by automatically removing topological errors such as slivers, gaps and overlaps; removing breaks across old tile boundaries; and inferring missing links such as property lines across suburban shared front gardens.

The council has achieved:

The resolution of hidden data problems (e.g. where planning applications did not align with BLPUs)
The enforcement of data quality
Massive time savings in planning application notifications
Return on investment

Read the full case study here

A version of this case study has also been written by Ordnance Survey Great Britain. Read the Ordnance Survey joint case study here.

www.enfield.gov.uk

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