Architecture

iShare is a loosely coupled suite of custom applications and open-source packages

There has been a lot of ‘noise’ about open source software but despite some criticism it is now largely accepted that there is a place for it in commercial applications..

Public sector organizations are required to make much of their data available to the public but first you have to pull it together so that it can be published in a meaningful way. Once you have the data integration piece in place it is then possible to publish the data.

iShare achieved this through the ‘My House’ a one stop shop of information directly relevant to where citizens live. The design has evolved over time but the principle remains the same, gather the data, transform it and publish it in an accessible way.

Astun is a big fan of ‘Open Source’ and is a signed up member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Whilst our commercial software is proprietary, our solutions could rightly be described as ‘hybrid’ because they use MapServer, the leading open source web mapping package and the PostgreSQL open source database with the PostGIS extension.