The Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) represents a crucial infrastructure for public sector data, providing comprehensive access to national data sources. However, despite its extensive coverage, many organisations struggle to fully leverage this valuable resource.
What is the PSGA?
The Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) is a central pillar of the public sector’s data infrastructure. PSGA is an agreement that provides paid-for access to an extensive range of national data sources for public sector bodies to support their essential strategic and operational tasks. The PSGA agreement covers an extensive range of data that can be accessed through the Ordnance Survey. PSGA is not the only source of public sector data, but it is an important one that enables all other data to be set in the context of the UK’s official national mapping.
Challenges in PSGA Data Utilisation
Despite significant advances of the PSGA, many public sector organisations still fail to capture the full benefits of the data they can access due to the following remaining barriers:
- Data Discovery:
The PSGA agreement covers an expansive range of data, but this breadth can be overwhelming, particularly for non-GIS specialists. Many users across different departments struggle to navigate geospatial information, often unable to distinguish between PSGA and non-PSGA datasets. Understanding the specific attributes within these datasets is particularly challenging. Without GIS expertise, users find it difficult to determine what information is available, what each dataset contains, and how it might be relevant to their operational needs.
- Data Size and Processing:
PSGA is an extensive agreement covering national data. The scale and extent of this data is therefore vast and processing it for use can be time-consuming and challenging. In addition to being large in extent, the data can also be highly granular, creating substantial computational challenges that can strain even the most advanced GIS software.
- Putting Insights in the Hands of Operators:
Given these wider challenges, PSGA data often requires processing by GIS experts. A critical bottleneck therefore emerges in data accessibility. While GIS experts can process these datasets, non-technical staff — the ultimate beneficiaries of the data —frequently depend on GIS teams to access and interpret the information. This dependency creates workflow inefficiencies and limits the data’s potential impact across different departments like planning, transport, and social care. Visualisation of data also often depends on costly license fees which limit the ability for individual directorates to use this data on a routine basis. As a result, many licensees of the PSGA are failing to maximise its value.
Our work at Cadence
At Cadence we have been working extensively with our public sector partners to address these challenges, streamline access and discovery of PSGA data and transform its usefulness for non-GIS experts so that it’s value can be maximised within operations.
For example, through funding through MCHLG’s PropTech programme, we have been working with Plymouth City Council to transform the discovery, access and visualisation of PSGA data for distributed teams across the council.
Case Study: Land Use and Buildings Data
An example of a highly valuable but challenging-to-use dataset within the PSGA is Land Use and Buildings Data. This data is extensive, highly granular and, as a result, suffers from the multiple challenges listed above.
Attempting to process this data within solutions like QGIS, routinely leads to system errors, demonstrating how hard it can be for true public sector beneficiaries to discovery and use.
Cadence have addressed these challenges as follows:
Data Size and Processing:
At Cadence we employ industry-leading data pipelines across our curated and managed data services. These enable us to process data in the cloud using elastic compute, allowing us to seamlessly optimise it for web-based visualisation, interrogation and insight delivery “behind the scenes”. We developed a series of algorithms to optimise how we serve these highly detailed datasets to users, providing a best-in-class balance between detail served and load-times.
By using Cadence’s existing data optimisation, we immediately cut the data to the field of interest, further improving its performance within the application.
The result is seamless, streamlined loading of high fidelity PSGA data, making this available within the web from a standard laptop.
Data Discovery
We have consolidated PSGA data into a data catalogue alongside non-PSGA data, working with users to take a “back-to-basics” approach to data discovery. Over the past few months we have added over 1,000 datasets to Cadence’s core data bank, vastly increasing the amount of data available for discovery and, as a result, have made (and continue to make) significant changes to how this data can be searched.
By adding extensive metadata, attribute-level and dataset-level common-word tags, more intelligent search, advanced filtering and an improved UI, we’ve transformed how users can search and discover data across Open, PSGA, user-uploaded and managed service sources.
These two key transformations means that we’re making data directly discoverable and usable to key public sector services, without manual intervention, vastly reducing bottlenecks and transforming the service the GIS/Digital team can provide.
But we’re also going even further. By integrating data into Cadence Templates, we actively integrating PSGA and other national datasets into templates for key strategy documents, so that these are available at the click of a button. Whether it is a Local Transport Plan, Housing Needs Assessment, Renewable Energy Assessment or other key piece of evidence, we’re streamlining PSGA data directly into these, supporting local authorities to improve efficiencies and reduce costs.
Putting Insights into the Hands of Users
Finally, at Cadence we’re also revolutionising access to geospatial tools through Distributed GIS. This approach, building on free-tier or highly cost-effective Enterprise bundles is transforming the per user cost of access to web-based GIS software. This means that everyone in an organisation can immediately have interactive access to the data that will deliver enhanced insights and prioritised delivery.
This self-serve model, build around the industry’s leading non-expert interface, enables everyone to benefit from PSGA data, irrespective of their level of GIS knowledge. The easy-to-use approach of Cadence means that someone with no previous GIS experience can discover, load and interact with high-value PSGA data within a couple of mouse clicks.
The Future of Public Sector Data
By removing technical barriers and simplifying data access, Cadence is helping public sector organisations unlock the full potential of geospatial data. This approach promises to transform operational efficiency, decision-making, and strategic planning across the full suite of public services.
As you can imagine, we’re exceptionally excited to see how this new bank of users start interacting with PSGA data to deliver even more value for the public sector.
Talk to Us Today
If you’re interested in finding out more about our approach to PSGA data or how Distributed GIS can transform your operations, reach out to our friendly, expert team today.