July 18, 2012 -- Following the successful deployment of its TAN15 Development Advice Map for flood risk ( http://data.wales.gov.uk/apps/floodmapping/), the Welsh Government has extended its use of the viaEuropa hosted map service from Europa Technologies to power two further web mapping applications.

By reusing the viaEuropa service in this way, the Welsh Government is maximising its return on investment (ROI). David Roberts, the Welsh Government’s Geography and Technology Operations Manager, commented: “It has been our aim to use a single web service to deliver high quality Ordnance Survey mapping to all of our public facing web mapping applications. The viaEuropa hosted map service was easy to integrate and lets us do just that. We no longer have to worry about publishing the OS maps ourselves, enabling us to focus on more important priorities for the Welsh Government. We look forward to using the viaEuropa service in more applications in the future.”

The second application to benefit from viaEuropa is the Marine Conservation Zone Consultation map viewer ( http://data.wales.gov.uk/apps/marine/). This application encourages citizen engagement in important issues for Wales. This is achieved by enabling members of the public to view and explore the 10 potential site options for Marine Conservation Zones that will be reduced to three or four designated sites through a consultation process. The current phase of the consultation process runs until the end of July 2012. The application uses the award-winning viaEuropa hosted map service to overlay various habitat datasets on high quality Ordnance Survey mapping, created using OS OpenData and OS VectorMap Local. In this case the base maps are displayed in greyscale to draw attention to the habitat datasets displayed on top.

The third application to utilise viaEuropais the interactive trip planner on the Wales Coast Path website ( http://www.walescoastpath.gov.uk/plan_your_trip/interactive_map.aspx). The website is a joint project between the Welsh Government and the Countryside Council for Wales, allowing visitors to plan their routes along the coast path of Wales, the only country in the world where you can walk the entire length of its coastline! The application uses the same viaEuropa service as before, but this time displaying the base maps in colour to allow users to fully appreciate the variety of the Welsh coastline.

Warren Vick, Founder & Director, Europa Technologies concluded: “The Welsh Government is an excellent example of a public sector organisation looking to deliver efficiencies by reusing shared services. Its forward thinking approach illustrates best practice that we expect to see replicated elsewhere, in the UK public sector and beyond.”

About viaEuropa

viaEuropa is an online service from Europa Technologies for the delivery of high quality digital maps direct to your application. viaEuropa bridges the chasm between raw data delivery and a finished map product ready for deployment, making it ideal for any organisation needing to deliver location intelligent applications whilst saving time, saving money and improving customer service.

About Europa Technologies

Europa Technologies is an award-winning specialist in digital maps and associated services for a wide variety of market sectors and applications. Our resources allow organisations with international interests to better understand their customers, assets and markets, in a geographic context, to gain a competitive or strategic advantage. Mapping products and services from Europa Technologies are used by many Fortune Global 500 companies and several missions of the United Nations. The company has global licence agreements with a number of leading Internet-based service providers including Google. Through deployment via Google Earth alone, our world data products have been seen by over 700 million people, approximately 1 in 10 of the world's entire population.

Contact

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