Location

Everything happens somewhere...

Local Authority websites have been improved beyond all measure in the last 5 years and we are proud to have been at the forefront of innovation in this area. iShare enables a local authority to pull information from backend systems used by its departments such as planning and highways and present it on the council’s website based upon a citizen’s home location.

The importance of location

Location is important because it means that only information relevant to that location gets presented. Because we use the council’s primary address database, the NLPG, to do this iShare can cross match data very easily using the UPRN, (unique property reference number). The NLPG holds a geo-coordinate for each UPRN and since councils all use digital maps iShare has everything it needs to display this information on a map too, everything from the location of a school to a recycling centre.

One step beyond...

iShare goes beyond this however because it is underpinned by PostGIS/PostgreSQL and MapServer, open source software components that provide the means to store, interrogate transform and present spatial data. What does that mean? It means quite simply that we can take a council’s data present it on a web page as text, as an image or on a map. It is this functionality that enables citizens to see new planning applications in the vicinity of their homes or see exactly how their houses perform in a local authority thermal heat loss survey. It also enables interaction. Maps can be used to report and precisely locate the location of an abandoned car or unpleasant graffiti.

Unique

It is this innovative use web and spatial technology that makes the iShare platform unique.