THE DIGITAL NATIONAL FRAMEWORK- BRIDGING INFORMATION THROUGH GEOGRAPHY

We are currently witnessing massive growth in the use of geographic information around the world. Governments are seizing on the power of geography, location based services are now finally starting to develop and the citizen has more access to geographic information today than ever before. This paper describes how, to support this greater adoption, geography is gradually being transformed in Great Britain to better support and service all users and “join up ” the many disparate forms of information. The concept underlying this “joined up ” approach in Great Britain is an initiative called the Digital National Framework (DNF). Elements of the DNF are being developed in conjunction with other mapping agencies and evolved in conjunction with a wide number of users in the government, utility and private sectors. The paper will also demonstrate how a whole range of technologies such as remote sensing, photogrammetry, laser scanning, real time kinematic GPS, land survey and data in 3rd party databases are being combined to take geographic information to new levels of integration which offers potential for a powerful national capability. At the heart of the DNF model features such as buildings, land parcels, roads etc, are each referenced by a unique identifier (known as a TOID) to enable data linking & data sharing – the TOID represents an entity at a physical location. The structure of DNF will be described in more detail in the paper but the scope also incorporates the national coordinate system and the relationships with GPS, reference and application data models, metadata, feature catalogues, referencing relationships, data quality, compliance and terminology. Fundamental principles include reuse of information (capture once and use many times), the ability to apply common methods of publishing derived information, enabling flexible visualisation and support for web services of many kinds. The DNF i