Local Authorities are increasingly required to share data efficiently within departments, between departments and with external organisations and the general public. Staffordshire County Council (SCC) has a number of departments using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and each maintains its own data and uses different GIS tools to manipulate that data. This can result in duplication of effort and may lead to inconsistencies between datasets. SCC is tackling these problems by enabling interoperability throughout the organisation.

SCC was faced with the challenge of achieving interoperability without a corporate GIS system or strategy.  Their central ICT staff had little knowledge or experience of spatial data, as this had historically been managed by GIS users.  Their data was held in various systems, producing the classic multi-vendor applications situation (ESRI, MapInfo, 1Spatial etc. all used in different departments).

SCC was faced with the option of moving to a single GIS platform, or choosing an enterprise solution based on interoperable principles. They needed to enhance the underlying spatial data quality and remove errors.  They needed a single database accessible across the organisation for centralised data storage and a link between business and spatial data.  SCC required real-time access to maps and plans, for the data to be available for sharing internally and externally and a secure and scalable platform. With up-to-date high quality data SCC could then utilise their spatial data for improved business analysis and decision-making.

1Spatial’s Radius Topology provides a persistent, server-side solution for ensuring ongoing data quality management; it is client agnostic and so works with all desktop and web editors that can read/write the Oracle spatial data type [SDO_Geometry].

In order to improve usability, SCC’s Property Unit also wanted to integrate DWG floor plans with GIS and business data to access and analyse information such as asbestos presence and condition, accommodation usage and asset location. This interoperable initiative will enable a far greater proportion of business data to be interrogated spatially, save a considerable amount of time and cost by automating processes and improve data quality, reliability and capture to release timelines. This initiative was the basis for the DNF work, learn more.

Read the full case study here.

www.staffordshire.gov.uk