North Wales unitary authority, Conwy County Borough Council, has appointed Innogistic to supply their new corporate geospatial infrastructure. The appointment was made following submission of a full tender against a number of other suppliers. The new solution will centralise the authority’s GIS requirements into a new corporate spatial data infrastructure (SDI), comprising a centralised spatial database and web applications for staff and members of the public using Innogistic’s innovative Community Map solution.
The council currently runs a large number of desktop GIS installations which access an unmanaged central file store. These require separate licensing, management and updating which can be costly and time consuming, and result in data duplication which is prone to error and inconsistency.
The new solution will enable Conwy to migrate its existing file store into a central spatial data warehouse held in Microsoft SQL Server. Staff responsible for editing and maintaining individual geo-data layers will do so via Innogistic’s Community Map web application. This approach will save the council both time and money by centralising the management and update of geospatial data. It will also grant access to GIS and web-map viewing facilities across the whole organisation without increasing licence costs.
Dan Ormsby, Innogistic’s Commercial Director said: “Community Map’s advanced on-line data editing tools make it very easy and cost effective for council staff to update and maintain the new central spatial data hub thereby avoiding the potential for data duplication, error and inconsistency. Powerful permission administration tools allow the GIS Manager at Conwy to manage access levels and give individual users different rights to different data layers as well as to customise the GIS tools available to that user according to their job requirements.”
Community Map will also provide a new map based information portal for the authority’s public facing web site, in both English and Welsh languages. By making use of the intuitive web-mapping tools in Community Map, the public will be able to view service based information such as planning applications, office locations, school catchment areas, etc. The Community Map “Report-It” tool also allows the public to provide the exact geographical locations of any feed-back reports they are making, such as fly-tipping, missed bins, faulty streetlights, abandoned vehicles etc.
Sarah Davies, Corporate e-Government Manager at Conwy County Borough Council said: “This new solution will enable Conwy to deliver functionality tailored to suit the needs of our GIS users rather than providing fixed packages that offer too much or too little. The enablement of data sharing, reduction in duplication, improvement of data quality and integration of datasets such as the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) will provide an improved GIS environment for our users. Service delivery to the public will be enhanced through the use of Community Map on our website by enabling the publication of location-based service information.”
Sarah Davies concluded by saying: “Conwy were looking for a solution that would co-exist with elements of our existing GIS infrastructure whilst fully replacing others. Innogistic’s Community Map has impressed in terms of its technical capabilities with the levels of functionality scoring very well against our tender specification. We have also been impressed by Innogistic’s willingness to initiate further development in order to meet our individual requirements.”