National Public Transport Gazetteer
(NPTG)  Home

Welcome to the NPTG

The National Public Transport Gazetteer provides a topographic database of towns and settlements in the UK; it provides a common frame of reference for the National Public Access Nodes (NaPTAN) schema and other UK Public Transport Information schemas such as JourneyWeb. 

The appropriate naming of towns and places is vital for providing effective place and stop finding in all modern on-line journey planners and other Passenger Information systems.

  • The NPTG XML schema is used to distribute topographic data from the NPTG database to users.

  • An ancillary schema, the NPTG Discovery XML schema,  is used to exchange data that relates topographical localities with the available computer information services. The NPTG Discovery schema can be used for the automatic provisioning and system configuration of systems, for example to find the server that covers particular stops for journey planning or real time services.

The NPTG schemas are part of an integrated family of UK Public Transport data schemas. The schemas share common modules with other UK PT schemas such as TransXChange and JourneyWeb. NPTG is currently documented and delivered as part of NaPTAN.

Version 2.0 is the first release of an NPTG XML schema (previous exchange used only a csv format) and includes a comprehensive harmonisation with GovTalk XML standards and NaPTAN 2.0, as well as a number of functional improvements.


The NPTG database and schema are maintained under contract by the Department for Transport.

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