Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey is Great Britain's national mapping agency, a government-owned company that maintains the addressing and mapping layer the UK property market runs on - the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN), the TOID, AddressBase, and the OS National Geographic Database. The UK has no MLS; residential listings sit behind the Rightmove/Zoopla duopoly and agency CRM software, so the open layer in this market is public-sector rather than private, and OS is one half of it alongside HM Land Registry. Its API posture is unusually honest for this sector - the OS Data Hub is a self-serve developer portal with real machine-readable contracts, including OGC-conformant OpenAPI 3.0 documents served live and anonymously at api.os.uk for OS NGD API - Features and Tiles, plus published OpenAPI for the OS Downloads and OS Net APIs. The split that matters is licensing, not reachability: OS OpenData products (OS Open UPRN, OS Open TOID, Code-Point Open, OS Open Names, Boundary-Line, OS Open Linked Identifiers) are free and downloadable with no API key at all through the OS Downloads API, while the premium addressing and mapping products behind OS Places API, OS Features API, and the NGD collections require a paid Premium plan or Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) membership. RESO plays no part here - the Real Estate Standards Organization standards are a US MLS construct and appear nowhere in the OS estate. Home market is the United Kingdom.
Solid contracts, transparent operations, and an easy start — typically complete on four or five facets with one clear soft spot.
API Evangelist profiles Ordnance Survey the way a machine reads it — 20 machine-readable artifacts across 12 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Ordnance Survey scores 68.5/100 (strong), with a separate agent-readiness read of 79/100 (agent native). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile Ordnance Survey
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Ordnance Survey. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 12
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
OS NGD API - Features
OGC API - Features conformant access to the OS National Geographic Database, serving building, land, address, and transport feature collections as GeoJSON. The OpenAPI 3.0.1 des...
OS NGD API - Tiles
OGC API - Tiles conformant vector tile service over the OS National Geographic Database, including tile matrix sets and styles. The OpenAPI 3.0.1 description is served live and ...
OS Downloads API
Automated bulk download of OS OpenData and OS Premium datasets. The OpenData half of this API answers anonymously with no key - 26 open products including OS Open UPRN, OS Open ...
OS Net API
High-precision GNSS data from the OS Net network of continuously operating reference stations across Great Britain, including station metadata, health, and RINEX observation files.
OS Places API
Address search and geocoding over AddressBase Premium - every UPRN in the United Kingdom, Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, with current, provisional, and historic address ...
OS Names API
A geographic directory of identifiable places, roads, and settlements in Great Britain, with find and nearest operations.
OS Linked Identifiers API
Resolves the relationships between properties, streets, and OS MasterMap identifiers - UPRN to TOID to USRN - which is the join key between OS data, HM Land Registry records, an...
OS Match & Cleanse API (withdrawn)
Matched and cleansed supplied address strings against OS authoritative addressing data, returning a matched AddressBase record and confidence score. WITHDRAWN: end of life 31 Ma...
OS Features API
OGC Web Feature Service (WFS 2.0.0) over OS MasterMap and premium feature data, with getCapabilities, describeFeatureType, and getFeature operations plus a product archive. XML/...
OS Maps API
Pre-rendered raster map tiles in multiple OS styles, served as OGC WMTS and as ZXY tiles.
OS Vector Tile API
Vector tile service delivering detailed OS MasterMap data as styleable vector tiles.
OS OAuth 2 API
OAuth 2.0 client credentials token service issuing time-limited access tokens for OS Data Hub APIs, so project API keys need not be embedded in browser code. The token URL is ht...
Scroll within the panel for all 12 ·
MCP Servers 1
Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.
Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.
ordnance-survey-mcp.yml
MCP SERVERPricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Ordnance Survey Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSSecurity Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for Ordnance Survey — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 6
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 10
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·
Design & Contract 6
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 4
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 6
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 8
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Scroll within the panel for all 8 ·
Commercial 6
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 4
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/ordnance-survey · machine-readable index on apis.io