January 29, 2013 -- Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge and Malling District Councils in Kent are using Getmapping’s hosted WMS service to access aerial photography of the whole county. The aerial photography not only covers the whole of Kent but also multiple time periods representing the County’s three year update cycle. This means Council officers have access to aerial photography from 2000 to 2012, 5 distinct periods which enable them to monitor change accurately.
High resolution aerial photography datasets can be quite large and take up a lot of server space which then has to be managed. Increasingly popular, WMS is a standard protocol for streaming georeferenced map imagery over the Internet to web based applications, GIS and CAD software. WMS feeds load only the imagery that a user actually needs to see rather than a whole dataset, which can often result in lengthy load times or delays when panning and zooming. Aerial photography can put a heavy strain on a network especially when it is being accessed by many users at the same time. Having an external source available through WMS reduces network load and the costs associated with data storage, update and management.
“Getmapping’s WMS service went live to our users across the two District Councils in March 2012,” said Peter Wain, GIS Manager at Tunbridge Wells District Council. “The speed of the service is impressive and provides our officers across the intranet with seamless access to aerial photography for 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012, the latest aerial photography flown and processed by Getmapping. Having access to imagery on a three year cycle is important to enable us to track change, check planning consents and much more. These days having access to the whole county is vital because our management of services and infrastructure does not just stop at the District boundary. It also enables closer working collaboration with the County Council,” continued Peter Wain.
“Our WMS and WFS services are going from strength to strength and we can now offer our customers not only aerial photography coverage but also the complete range of Ordnance Survey mapping including MasterMap for their area said Dave Horner, Managing Director of Getmapping. “We can ingest data from multiple sources including old archive imagery which can be scanned to create a digital layer if so required. Having this wealth of data easily accessible without the need to manage it makes sense for many organisations that have a large number of users,” continued Horner.
