Collection

Best practice guidance and tools for managing geospatial data

Resources, tools and guidance to help you manage and share your geospatial data and/or data in a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) way.

The Geospatial Commission has brought together a range of tools and best practice guidance aimed at helping those involved in the management and sharing of geospatial data to ensure their data is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). Whilst we have created these tools and guidance for geospatial managers, the principles can be applied to all data management and sharing.

In the Best Practice Guides section we have a range of guides that can help geospatial data managers. The below videos give an overview of those guides. We have also published a video below on licensing linked to our blog on improved data accessibility. Our Geospatial Glossary can help those new to geospatial data understand the common terms used, as well as to provide everyone in the industry a set of common definitions in one place.

Our single Data Exploration Licence (DEL) harmonises and simplifies the access and use of geospatial data held by our Partner Bodies. This allows anyone to freely access data for research, development and innovation purposes. We have also produced guidance for designing geospatial data portals.

Tools

The authoritative data assessment tool (ods file, 186KB) is designed to help identify data publishing organisations and datasets which can be considered trustworthy so that users can have confidence in the data they find.

The data sharing assessment (DSA) tool (ods file, 132KB) is designed to apply standard criteria for data publishers to consider when releasing data responsibly.

Guidance on Crowd Capture to Extract Location Data from Archived Material video

Making your geospatial data easy to find: Metadata best practice guide for data publishers video

Authoritative Data and Geospatial Themes and Related Data Publishers

Designing user-focused geospatial data portals video

Licensing

Best Practice Guides

Geospatial Glossary

Reports

Updates to this page

Published 9 June 2020
Last updated 26 May 2022 + show all updates
  1. UK Geospatial Data Standards - Coordinate Reference Systems added UK Geospatial Data Standards Register added

  2. Videos and previously published guides added and text reworked.

  3. Adding guidance on how to access free address data using AddressBase

  4. First published.