Airbus’ Web Services Assist UK Geospatial Commission

In 2020, the UK Geospatial Commission looked to Airbus to provide stable, secure services to manage aerial photography and terrain datasets of Great Britain, and to provide free at the point of use access across UK public sector organisations.

Having successfully delivered against these requirements, Airbus has been awarded a contract extension to continue the service until March 2024.

All eligible users through this enhanced Aerial Photography Great Britain (APGB) web service, can access these datasets.

Through these Airbus managed web services, APGB datasets can be accessed via Web Map Service (WMS), Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). Since the service went live in December 2020, it has since seen a large increase in usage across the public sector.

One of the major service users within the UK Cabinet Office is ResilienceDirect™, which enables practitioners to work together across geographical and organisational boundaries during the preparation, response and recovery phases of an event or emergency. Spokesperson Dominique Casson - Service Delivery Manager said: “ResilienceDirect has worked closely with Airbus to ensure a seamless transition for displaying the most up-to-date aerial imagery layer on the ResilienceDirect mapping service. This has provided an excellent data visualisation asset for our resilience community which has over 84,000 users”.

This service offers many benefits such as enabling users to write queries for feature and attribute analysis thanks to the metadata made available through the WFS. The service has also increased performance and efficiency for users, with imagery requests now processed within just 0.5 seconds.

Paul Russell, Head of UK Programmes - Intelligence, Airbus Defence and Space said: “Airbus supports the UK Governments’ Geospatial Strategy whose vision is that by 2025, the UK will have a coherent national location data framework. This UK Geospatial Strategy promotes and safeguards the use of location data, improves access to better location data, enhances capabilities, skills and awareness, and enables innovation".
Airbus has worked closely with UK Government departments to ensure we deliver an enhanced solution fit for their needs. Airbus will continue to evolve the services, supporting greater interoperability with existing departmental workflows”.

Airbus Intelligence operates the largest constellation of optical and radar Earth Observation satellites commercially available today including the Vision-1 high-resolution sensor operated and managed in the United Kingdom. In addition to our advanced satellite imagery, we provide accurate geospatial data solutions and value-add products for smarter decision-making.