A brief history of a national gazetteer

NLPG   The first notion of a national centralised gazetteer came about in the mid 90's, as an independent committee in partnership with the British Standards Institute and the Association for Geographic Information, defined the new 'open' addressing standard (BS7666). The processes to create and maintain a single, national address infrastructure was agreed and became what is now known as the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG). What made the NLPG address database so useful was the shared Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) which has meant address information, although dispersed and sometimes denormalised and modified could always be uniquely identified across systems, organisations and sectors.  This means that users of two distinct systems, despite their differences could both refer to exactly the same address and geographical location.    OS AddressBase Premium    In 2011, Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail including data by GeoPlace combined data sets to produce a more detailed combination of address gazetteers. It included the best parts of local government's National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), Ordnance Survey's OS MasterMap Address Layer 2 products and the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF).

Did you know? Addressfront's Corporate Gazetteer Management System allows you to import, create and manage a wide range of address gazetteer formats including NLPG, AddressBase Premium, PAF and LPS (OSNI) alongside your legacy data or proprietary address based data.   Find out more (about our corporate gazetteer solutions)