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https://geospatialcommission.blog.gov.uk/about-us/

About the Geospatial Commission

About us 

The Geospatial Commission is an expert committee that sets the UK’s geospatial strategy and promotes the best use of geospatial data.

The Geospatial Commission

The Geospatial Commission was established in 2018 as an independent, expert committee responsible for setting the UK’s geospatial strategy and coordinating public sector geospatial activity. Its aim is to unlock the significant economic, social and environmental opportunities offered by location data and to boost the UK’s global geospatial expertise.

The Commission has a mandate and budget to drive and deliver changes by working in partnership with others. This means we:

  • Provide strategic oversight of the geospatial ecosystem in the UK, setting geospatial strategy, policy and standards.
  • Hold the budget for the public sector’s largest investment in geospatial data.
  • Make targeted investments in data projects that accelerate innovation and adoption of geospatial data applications

Our responsibilities

The overarching objectives of the Commission are to increase economic growth and improve social and environmental outcomes by:

  • setting cross-cutting geospatial strategy, policy and data standards
  • promoting competition within markets for geospatial data, products and services
  • improving accessibility, interoperability and quality of data
  • improving capability, skills and resources to support the growth of new and existing geospatial businesses and improve public services

UK’s Geospatial Strategy

The UK’s geospatial strategy, published in June 2020, sets a vision that by 2025 the UK will have a coherent national location data framework. The strategy sets out an ambitious programme of activity to achieve the vision, across four key missions:

  • Promoting and safeguarding the use of location data to provide an evidenced view of the market value of location data, set clear guidelines on data access, privacy, ethics and security, and promote better use of location data.
  • Improving access to better location data to streamline, test and scale the development of new and existing location data ensuring it is findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable and of high quality.
  • Enhancing skills, capabilities and awareness to develop more people with the right skills and tools to work with location data - across organisations and sectors - to meet the UK’s future needs and support global development.
  • Enabling innovation to maximise the commercial opportunities for innovation and promote market-wide adoption of high value emerging location technologies.

The Geospatial Commission’s Charter (published in our Call For Evidence document) sets out how we will do this

Partner bodies

The commission has a formal relationship with six, core ‘partner bodies’ (the Geo6). The partner bodies are :

Each of these partners play a central role in the delivery of the UK’s Geospatial Strategy- both through the geospatial data they hold and their extensive expertise.

Our director is Thalia Baldwin, our chair is Sir Bernard Silverman with Nigel Clifford as deputy.