The knowledge economy, enabled by easier and faster electronic processing, has brought geography to the fore in the minds of a wide variety of users, from politicians, government, and the commercial sector and to the citizen. This appears to be a make or break moment for national mapping agencies involved in mapping and geography. Geographic information, more than mapping, is now in demand. This information needs to fulfill specific roles and needs for the people who use it, often by integrating with all kinds of existing information, such as client inventories, property information, and consumer services for “where is my nearest?” The Ordnance Survey (OS) embarked on a program to redevelop the existing National Topographic Database in the late 1990s and this is now being transformed with the release of the OS MasterMap based on the Digital National Framework, which is a conceptual model and standards for integrating geographic information. There are several parallels with The National Map being
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Murray et al. (2003) studied this question.