25 Sep 2025

Event Round Up: Fire Innovation Forum – Geographic Information Systems

As a part of our ongoing collaboration with the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), under the umbrella of an MoU co-signed last year, our most recent Fire Innovation Forum session focused on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their application in the fire service.

Alongside Steve Taylor, Strategic Data Lead at NFCC DDaT, expertise were also brought to the discussion by Richard Barker and Dave Chapman from the Ordnance Survey, and Dan Cooper, contributing user insight from Devon & Somerset Fire Service.

Providing context to the meeting, Steve gave an overview to the NFCC and the importance of GIS for the sector, both in terms of the mapping itself and the data that sits behind it. GIS can map out incidents and risks, enabling the fire service to look for trends or find properties that need interventions.

Delving into the role of data in leveraging the potential for GIS, Richard set the scene by introducing the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), a 10 year contract with the Government Digital Service. The PSGA ensures data operability across the public sector, providing access and support for public organisations.

Richard introduced key GIS concepts that benefit the fire service, including intelligent routing, contextual mapping and highlighting incident location using an address gazetteer. The OS National Geographic Database (OS NGD) is a structured database containing authoritative geospatial data for Great Britain. It provides the most current, comprehensive and richly attributed data describing Great Britain ever produced by OS in non-proprietary data formats that are easily integrated into a wide array of customer systems and workflows.

You can access the presentation here.

To showcase the operational uses of GIS data, Dan Cooper presented its benefits through its potential for operational risk mapping, incident analysis, community engagement, multi-agency response and dynamic risk modelling.

He expressed his intentions to promote further collaboration with the tech sector, to encourage a knowledgeable network and promote the opportunities presented by GIS technology. Through this, he noted that several challenges need to be addressed, such as ensuring systems are resilient and enable successful vehicle deployment through improved pre-mobilisation knowledge.

Dan’s slides can be found here.

To follow, the attendees engaged in a thought-provoking conversation, exploring the use of other data sets and how the technology is being secured, signifying positive first steps to a strengthened partnership between the fire and tech industry in the GIS space.

You can find more information on techUK's Fire Innovation Forum here.