How do other countries manage their most important geospatial data?

As part of our work on high-value datasets, we’ve been comparing how other countries manage their most valuable geospatial datasets. These include national mapping, address and cadastral (land ownership) data.

Around the world, it’s increasingly recognised that high-quality, accessible national datasets on these themes are crucial to support startups and economic growth.

So we’ve published a comparative study on how various high-productivity countries, particularly those that score high on international indexes of data maturity, manage their key geospatial institutions.

We found that most of the countries we studied manage these datasets within a coordinated public-sector governance structure: 

• Switzerland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have a single government agency managing their national mapping, address and cadastral data. 

• In the US, France, and Denmark, these datasets are managed by different government agencies, but most of it is coordinated under one overarching organisation.

We also found that all these countries have committed to making high-value data assets more available to the public, and many already make most or all of these key geospatial datasets freely available. 

In the UK, however, these datasets are managed in a complex structure, split across public and private organisations, and little data is freely available. There is also no national strategy to improve the availability of geospatial data outside the public sector. 

We recommend that the UK follow the example of international peers, and adopt a national strategy to manage these datasets. It could begin by commissioning an independent review of how well the current governance and access arrangements for this data are working.

Read the full briefing here, and as always, please get in touch if you’d like to chat more about this.