May 14, 2014 -- With the UK facing a number of financial, social and environmental pressures businesses and public authorities are encountering a changing landscape within which they operate.  The GeoInformation Group has launched a suite of new geographic information products to help businesses and public authorities develop contingency plans and reduce their exposure to risk from these new pressures.

This innovative product suite offers a unique insight into the landscape of the UK and provides users with a reliable and valuable resource for mapping out these changes.

The suite contains four geographic information product groups

UKMap – a highly detailed and multi layered topographic database to locate and map out key geographic features. This product group includes: Buildings, 2D, Land Use, Transportation, Retail, Road, Trees

UKBuildings - a comprehensive and accurate profile of residential and commercial building stock. This product group includes: Building Age, Type, Footprint, Height for residential and commercial properties.

UKLand – a detailed and maintained information database that identifies land use and land cover. This product group includes: Land use and cover, vegetation and clutter.

UKSurvey – A bespoke mapping service using high resolution aerial imagery and ground based information including Aerial surveys (incl. UAV) and field surveys.

“Our approach has been to design really useful geographic information that has relevance for business and public authorities and give them increased knowledge about our changing world.  As everything happens somewhere utilising these location rich sources of information will help all businesses understand better the needs of their customers, where they live, work and play”, comments Seppe Cassettari, CEO of The GeoInformation Group.

These products are already making a difference supporting insurance companies to improve their risk underwriting, helping local authorities reduce energy consumption, green deal companies deliver energy programmes and property consultancies identify new development land.

“It is great to see our geographic data really making a difference to the way in which our customers tackle problems key to them and doing it through the use of location rich information”.

In detail the four products offer the following:

UKMap is a 1:1,000 large scale topographic database providing detailed mapping of buildings, gardens, roads, bridges, trees, etc  along with other key data layers, including land use, retail, 3D and aerial imagery all as one single integrated database.  Currently available for Greater London

UKLand includes three datasets, each available as a separate layer, namely Land Use, Vegetation and Clutter.

• Land Use offers a 34 class national land use and land cover database designed at a 1:10,000 scale and maintained on an annual basis.  Classes include rivers, peat bogs, orchards, farms, crop land, woodland, roads, rail, varying levels of urban densities, industrial parks, business parks, and retail parks. Provided in a standard GIS formats data is available for the UK as a whole or on a user selected area of interest.
• Vegetation offers a national vegetation database describing the density of vegetation cover for each of the UK’s 1.7m postcodes.  This is ideal for insurance companies seeking to understand the likely impact of subsidence on properties.  The model is based on information collected for the national land use database and other tree and vegetation surveys carried out by The GeoInformation Group.  Each postcode is scored with a calculated % cover of vegetation to give a direct vegetation cover indicator across the postcode.
• Clutter is a land cover database designed for radio communication planning and telecommunication applications.  This dataset includes specific land cover and height classes comprising key feature such as woodland and buildings.  It is available in standard GIS and bespoke radio planning formats, such as Planet and Aircom.

UKBuildings is a unique database categorising buildings by various features for 14.3 million properties in urban areas across England, Wales and Scotland.  For residential properties features include; footprint, height, age and type.  A new commercial property database is currently in production to provide similar information to include building use and material type.

UKSurvey is a series of data services to collect geographic information.  These services include: large format aerial surveys using state of the art digital survey cameras for large city area flying.  Data collected through this flying can be standard, full colour aerial imagery, near infrared imagery and thermal imagery.  Using other imaging solutions 3D data can be provided through the use of LiDAR sensors.

To balance these large format surveys we also provide unmanned aerial vehicles for small projects where speed and flexibility of capture is required.

Where imagery cannot provide all the data required ground based field surveys are offered using skilled field workers to collect new ground features (such as car parking bays, street signs, parks and gardens and housing associations assets) onto existing maps.

The GeoInformation Group

The GeoInformation Group is a private company based in Cambridge that is recognised as a leader in the development of unique and valuable geographic data solutions and products. Since 1995 when it delivered the first aerial photography CD based product to current day with its large scale topographic mapping product, UKMap, it has lead the way in delivering innovative geospatial solutions. Its datasets have been based on raw data it has created and on government data, for example imagery, mapping, digital terrain and addressing products. It has developed new geographic solutions for 3D elevation data, satellite imagery and mapping data. These solutions have been used by blue chip organisations such as RBS, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Google, AVIVA, Landmark, and Thames Water along with some 300 public sector organisations such as MOD, Metropolitan Police, London Fire, Transport for London and the Forestry Commission.

Contact:
Website: www.geoinformationgroup.co.uk

Editorial Enquiries:
Nikki Jones
01223 880077

Reader Enquiries:
The GeoInformation Group
01223 880077