Background

West Oxfordshire is a predominantly rural district council covering 714 km² with a population of 96,000. The district is spread across a large number of relatively small settlements, totalling 83 parishes.

Our brief

West Oxfordshire District Council (WODC) wanted to put in place a dynamic, geospatial information system (GIS) driven local information system. This was to provide a single resource for WODC Citizens to find services relevant to them in their local area using their postcode or address.

Our solution

BOCC worked with WODC's information technology staff to provide the street and postcode search using a data extract from the National Land and Property Gazetteer and the National Street Gazetteer. By selecting a particular property, data from WODC's existing GIS are displayed online for any user of the website. This includes a map and recent aerial photograph.

The GIS system was Cadcorp SIS (Spatial Information System) and we decided to integrate using web services and Cadcorp's GeognoSIS software. BOCC provided assistance to set up suitable overlays containing the textual data and wrote the interface scripts using Adobe ColdFusion. A caching strategy was developed and implemented to reflect the nature and type of user queries expected.

BOCC designed the user interface and also the application of watermarking and copyright details onto the graphical data - application side - since this was more efficient than using the source GIS to undertake this legal requirement.

Non-GIS data is also provided in the same single-page, seamlessly providing information to users from multiple back-office systems. This data includes council tax band, council tax charges, business rates and links to relevant online services. This provides a single resource for users to find services relevant to them in their local area.

Technologies

The system utilises:

• Microsoft™ SQL Server 2005
• Adobe® ColdFusion®
• Replication of data, which then integrates with WODC back-office systems
• Secure replication of data to and from internal systems via a virtual private network (VPN)
• Hosting on fully managed dedicated web servers at BOCC
• Provision of Disaster Recovery Facilities
• SSL (Secure Server Certificate)
• Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) 2.0 compliant