New Cadcorp App Simplifies Access to UK Gazetteer Data

For the first time, the UK now has a single definitive national address and street database: the National Address Gazetteer. The release of the new database is being celebrated at the ‘Everything Happens Somewhere 2011’ conference and exhibition, where Cadcorp is announcing a new product. The Cadcorp AddressBase Loader is set to simplify access to UK address data by automating many of the processes involved in accessing it.

Stephen Cox, application development manager at Cadcorp, explained the part played by the AddressBase Loader. "All National Address Gazetteer data is supplied by Ordnance Survey as a range of data products. These products typically have to be loaded into a database before they can be used. Although detailed database schema are provided, the task of implementing these and populating databases, is left to the user. The Cadcorp AddressBase Loader uses a wizard-driven interface to make this task simple and straightforward. It reads all three AddressBase data products as zipped CSV files and is able to load the data into predefined schema in the following widely-used database products: Microsoft Office Access, Microsoft SQL Server, PostGIS, and Oracle."

For many addressing applications it will be enough that the address data is held in a database. However, for GIS and web mapping systems to take advantage of the location information associated with an address, it is usually necessary to represent the address as a point feature in the GIS or spatial-enabled database. The Cadcorp AddressBase Loader provides this behaviour automatically. It is able to do so by exploiting the ability of Oracle, PostGIS and Microsoft SQL Server to handle spatial data. The loader creates the necessary geometry fields in the database schema, and populates these fields as part of the data loading process. 

Cadcorp has not designed the application to support only Cadcorp SIS users, as Mike O'Neil CEO, Cadcorp points out. "The theme for the conference at which we have chosen to announce this product is ‘Working together across the public sector'. We have always taken the view that different technologies should coexist in support of cooperative working and spatial data sharing. With this in mind, we have created the Cadcorp AddressBase Loader as a free-standing application. We would be delighted to see the application being widely deployed in the public sector, irrespective of the systems and technologies it is being used to support."