Riskaware have partnered with Ordnance Survey (OS), Great Britain’s national mapping service and geospatial data innovators, to introduce additional population and building datasets into the UrbanAware platform, a leading CBRNe/HazMat situational awareness and decision support tool. 

Now UrbanAware utilises even more powerful data sources to provide high quality, global coverage geospatial data from 4EI, as well as targeted, higher-fidelity GB data from OS. This integration gives users a more expansive suite of data and detail to choose from and meets the varying requirements of our users. International datasets can support organisations to meet national mapping requirements, while the UK-based data will be valuable for public sector and private organisations that wish to use the nation’s gold standard in geospatial data. 

OS is renowned for providing high-quality, trusted and detailed data for locations across Great Britain and are doing extensive work to support more innovative use cases for geospatial data. Their data and expertise are used by a large number of organisations including government and commercial industries. 

OS’s Rapid Prototyping Team are focused on developing new and improved application of geospatial data, to help organisations better solve challenges and enhance their data-based solutions.  

The team approached Riskaware to get involved in a research program designed to improve population estimates in buildings by introducing consideration of dynamic population behaviours, including working habits, time of day, age demographics. For example, the population of a commercial workplace building may be very low at night and at capacity during the day, or vice versa for a residential building. Understanding people’s habitual data provides the more accurate insights, for example when predicting the impact of major incidents. 

Whether building permeability datasets – how easily airborne pollutants can travel into and out of a building – could be more accurately determined in an automated manner was another avenue explored by OS. This information will be particularly relevant for UrbanAware’s combined indoor/outdoor modelling capabilities, which use building ventilation information to estimate the infiltration and exfiltration of CBRNe material.  

After a period of collaboration between the UrbanAware team and OS’s geospatial experts a number of new datasets have been produced for Riskaware to test and utilise. The prototyping of these new datasets have helped the teams understand key user requirements for future datasets and are an excellent foundation for further R&D. In addition, the platform also has access to the “traditional” OS mapping APIs and basemaps for a holistic geospatial integration. 

Organisations will benefit from OS’s familiar capabilities which provide detailed, targeted, and quality data. In future, this will be developed to enable new population dynamics and building information to be integrated into modelling solutions.  

Riskaware represents the first commercial organisation Ordnance Survey has worked with on this project area. UrbanAware will continue to partner with OS to discuss, develop and deliver new ideas focused on user benefit to the market. Previous work already demonstrates how compatible innovative work can be to the incident modelling platform; their intelligent cordons project for example could seamlessly enhance UrbanAware’s decision support during response planning. 

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