Town and Parish Councils

Parish Councils can join the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement, find out more about it on the OS website:
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/public-sector-geospatial-agreement
Quick link: Register for the PSGA

It is important that everyone who works with OS Licenced Data is aware of their obligations under the PSGA. OS provide an online interactive licensing guide to help you:
Quick link: Public sector licensing guide

If your council joins the PSMA it will need to nominate an appropriate individual to take on the role of "PMSA Principal Contact"
That person is required to:

• liase between the OS and the PC
• communitcate with other PSMA Members, e.g. other parishes, District Council, County Council etc.
• arrange for any data you wish to share with your Agents and Contractors to be properly licenced etc.

Help and advice is available from OS and there is a password protected ‘Public sector members area’ to provide this.

Managing your data orders is important and is probably best taken on by the Principal Contact but it is a good idea to also nominate another person who can act if the Principal Contact is indisposed.
OS make a lot of different products available through the PSMA, you don’t need to use all of them and you can choose which ones you do use, remember that the data is quite frequently updated and the more data you use the more data you’ll need to update in your system. HCC don’t offer technical support so you’ll need to look after this yourself, you would be well advised not to bite off more than you can chew.
Quick link: OS Products

You will need access to a Geographic Information System to use OS geospatial data. Neither HCC or OS recommend a particular solution, but you can learn about some of the options.
Quick link: Software for Mapping

When considering which software to use it is worth bearing in mind data sharing and system interoperability. The PSGA Member Licence enables members to share OS Licenced Data but data format is not standardised. Hertfordshire County Council’s corporate GIS is ArcGIS. Geospatial data is stored and used by HCC in a proprietary format, if you want to share data with, or get data from HCC your software will need to be able to use ESRI shapefiles and/or file geodatabase format. Converting data between different proprietary formats can be challenging. The Public Rights of Way data HCC makes freely available is provided in ESRI shapefile format.

Other resources: HCC have a number of online, interactive maps which may be of interest and some general background information and advice about GIS. You can access this via the Webmaps Homepage.
You could even link your own website to our Rights of Way map so that it zooms straight to your parish.
Quick link: Maps and Geographic Information

 

Download data for Town and Parish Councils