The Ordnance Survey
I’m a sucker for eye candy. The picture you can see on the right isn’t just the standard over-processed family shot of Great Britain: it’s the entire Ordnance Survey database, as a zoomable, interrogation-friendly display, running on what I expect is an impressive supercomputer cluster.
The Ordnance Survey wanted to talk about what it had been doing for agencies and subcontractors working on the coronavirus, besides bringing me up to date with its peculiar status in the information multiverse. After all, not many cloud companies can say that they owe their origin to the Jacobite rising of 1745, or that they’re protected by an Act of Parliament.
Most of my questions about the organisation were considered to be beyond one security or confidentiality boundary, so I decided to take a different tack, and discuss just what they had to do, and how easily it was done within lockdown.
The reply was far simpler than I was expecting, albeit full of names I sadly can’t share with you. It turns out that the Ordnance Survey just rejigged its licensing model. Agencies needing to look at
, or were given different privileges on their cloud logins, with some accompanying paperwork. The very problem that kept me from asking how many petaflops had, or who provided object stores, was the basis for fixing the sudden change in number of access requests were getting. Without any apparent sense of irony, the Ordnance Survey agreed that it was strange that the bits of data the previously uninformed needed to know, in order to combat Covid-19, were actually ready for them only a few different security levels away.
However, I just don’t get the overall rationale of the Ordnance Survey’s approach to data. The spokesman was immensely pleased when I asked if it was making a move away from the simple “lay of the land” and over to a much more informationbased approach – not just whether there were buildings here, but what jobs those buildings might do. I talked briefly about how drones would be vital to that change of analysis, because you had to get up close to tell the difference between a halal butcher, a rare-metals refinery and a PPE distributor: in a industrial estate they can look remarkably similar. I was shut down rapidly by the spokesman’s reference to “UAVs” (unmanned aerial vehicles), which are the bigger brothers of the little whizzy things we mostly think of when someone uses the D-word. This was a reminder that the “Ordnance” in this organisation’s name refers to the military uses of maps and geographic information.
I was left with one puzzle I couldn’t untangle. One of the demo images in the PowerPoint stack was a map of the Bristol region, spattered with blue dots ( see left). Each blue dot was a mobile phone antenna mount.
I assumed this was information useful to some local law enforcement agencies in case the crack-brained campaign to set fire to phone masts gained any momentum – but, then again, wasn’t it equally useful to the crack-brained types too? In which case, why lay it in front of a harmless old scribbler? Just as a thought experiment in both data security and map-as-valued data, this one struck me as a proper object lesson in the expression of value, and the need to know just who had seen what representation, at what point, with which security clearance. Like so many other aspects of business and computing, the pandemic brings to sharp relief not just the quality of the data collected, but how it is then composed and presented.