Finding the most remote buildings in Britain.

A geospatial big-data challenge using PostGIS, QGIS and open-source data.

Introduction

My passions in life all revolve around the great outdoors. When out hiking, running or mountain biking in the mountains, I’ve always been intrigued when stumbling across incredibly remote buildings, imagining the human stories connected to them and how the buildings came to be part of the landscape.

I thought it would be interesting to combine this with my work interests as a GIS Developer to find out where the most remote buildings in Britain are, using Open Source tools & datasets.

Remote
/rɪˈməʊt/
adjective
1. (of a place) situated far from the main centres of population; distant.

For the rest of the article, I will walk you through how I chose to go about the challenge.

The data:

Building data:

Ordnance Survey buiding dataset (left) and Open Street Map building dataset (right)

The Ordnance Survey is the UK’s national mapping agency and they provide some of the most comprehensive geospatial data available. They have a fantastic open-data portal…