OSGB MasterMap's Topographic Layer contains nine themes including roads, tracks and paths, buildings, landforms, water, height, heritage, structures, and administrative boundaries. You can import these themes as TopographicArea, LandformArea, TopographicLine, TopograpicPoint, CartographicText, CartographicSymbols, BoundaryLines, and DepartedFeatures. The TopographicArea feature type contains two 'complexes', Topography and Landform, which contain different polygons of information. The Landform polygons overlap the Topography polygons (which represent land features like slopes and cliffs).
We split the TopographicArea feature type output into two layers so it is possible to save them in different tables. The TopographicArea table contains only output whose areas defined in the OSGB user guide as being part of the Topography complex or Structuring Layer. There is a feature type in the GML Import dialog box called LandformArea, which allows the creation of the LandformArea table. See Importing and Displaying GML File Data for a clearer picture of this process in action.