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Introduction
OS VectorMap Local® is a highly-detailed, customisable, street-level map showing fences, building outlines, paths and street names, for the accurate lie of the land.
The tool included in the UK Data Loader will load data from a Geopackage into a Geodatabase.
Geopackages work natively in ArcGIS Pro so the data can be used immediately, however we recommend that the data is converted into a geodatabase so that it can be more easily integrated into the ArcGIS platform. The data loader will also make some changes to the data which improves the usability and cartography (see below).
Using the tool
Locate the OS VectorMap Local Toolset and run the script called “Load VML Data”.
Enter the location of the source geopackage.
Select the Existing Destination Geodatabase where the data is to be loaded.
You can decide what to do if there are existing datasets with the same name, you can choose to delete all existing data or to append to those datasets
Select where the log file is to be created.
Optionally, provide a feature class name prefix.
What does the tool do?
The tool takes VML data from the Geopackage and converts it into Geodatabase Feature Classes in the ArcGIS Pro project’s scratch geodatabase. If a scratch geodatabase doesn’t exist, it will create one.
The feature classes in the scratch geodatabase are then modified and copied to the Destination geodatabase.
Text orientation
The text orientation is provided in the raw data as degrees multiplied by 10, in order to be used in a GIS system it need to be in degrees and so the value is divided by 10.
Road Names
Road names are provided an all upper case in the raw data, these is changed to Title Case.
Single character text
The text featureclass contains a feature for each label but also features for each letter/character of every label. These are not needed and so are removed from the feature class.
How long will it take to process the data?
| Area | Geopackage size | Processed geodatabase size* | Hardware | Processing time |
| SU Region | 4.2GB
|
1.75GB
|
Virtual Machine
4 Cores 8GB RAM
|
1-2 hours |
| GB | 80GB
|
31GB
|
Virtual Machine
8 Cores 32GB RAM |
37 hours |
*Due to the nature of how the data is processed, we advise ensuring that you have free storage space in your project and output folder equal to the size of the input Geopackage
Styling the data
The tool adds the styling codes required by the Ordnance Surveys style sheets published through GitHub.
The Ordnance survey publish a getting started guide along with the layer files which explains how to repoint the layers at the new data sources.
The featureclasses created by the UK Data Loader have been designed to map directly to the layer names the OS have specified in their layers without the need for any further processing.
The orientation field a has already been adjusted in the data load so you do not need to follow the final step specified in the GitHub repository of dividing the orientation by 10.