In order to meet targets in our eGovernment agenda, we developed our public interactive mapping site, Shropmap, in 2004. The council’s corporate GIS system is provided by ESRI products, therefore, ArcIMS 9.0 was used to create the application.
http://maps.shropshire.gov.uk/website/shropmap/viewer.htm
ShropMap was launched with the aim of providing people with a comprehensive and useful online source of information about Shropshire and the services and facilities provided by the County Council. The spatial information is divided into seven categories:
- Business
- Community and leisure
- Council and democracy
- Education and learning
- Environment and planning
- Health and social care
- Travel and roads
Shropmap has continually been updated to add new features and information, including schools, libraries, bus routes, walking and cycling routes, youth facilities, recycling centres, public rights of way, street gazetteer, census information and much more.
As well as these services and facilities, information like public rights of way has been an extremely useful layer as the council receives constructive feedback from ramblers regarding these locations. Users of the service have been identified as members of the public, councillors, parish councils, businesses, voluntary organisations and council officers.
The functionality provided enables the user to view attribute information about any of the layers; links to other websites; powerful address and location searching; ‘find my nearest’ which will find and highlight information within a specified radius of an address.
Shropmap receives nearly 10,000 page views a month, which translates to about 300 a day. It is the third most popular part of our website and accountable for 2% of our total traffic. Approximately 50% of the page views are return visits.
Using the same product, specific applications have been developed for our intranet including integration with our Customer Relationship Management solution to enable our Customer Service Centre to identify the location of highways faults reported by the public.
Future
The government have confirmed that in Shropshire the County Council and the five district councils are being merged into a new authority called Shropshire Council; vesting day is 1 April 2009. Plans are being made to create new applications to reflect the new authority, possibly using ESRI’s ArcGIS Server product and utilising the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG).