June 25, 2013 -- UK local authority Rother District Council has moved its corporate Geographic Information System (GIS) to a virtual network based on open source software.

GGP Systems, the supplier of the Council’s GIS and Gazetteer Management Software (GMS) supported the East Sussex based council in the ambitious project to implement a new desktop mapping environment in order to improve customer experience, share services and increase efficiency.

Rother hope that by transforming their current environment from a traditional database configuration to one based on open source software the Council can facilitate resource sharing, allow for greater network scalability, improve security and, most importantly, realise significant cost savings.

By working with GGP Systems, Rother Council managed to reduce downtime of the widely used software while maintaining access to essential information during the migration.

“Having decided to move our GIS environment to a virtual network we discovered our current solution would simply cost too much in licensing,” commented Andrew Gale, Lead Corporate Data Officer at Rother District Council. “As GGP supports PostgreSQL which is a proven, stable environment as well as being open source, and therefore free, this seemed the obvious solution.”

“This project would have been difficult to complete without GGP’s help,” continued Andrew Gale. “With users of our GIS in virtually every department and every desktop having access to up to date addressing information it was imperative that we minimised disruption caused by downtime. By breaking the migration down into manageable units we were able to complete the project with only a few hours downtime in total!”

GGP GIS is used within nearly every department of Rother District Council. As the organisations corporate Geographical Information System it has over 100 distinct users accessing up to 400 different spatial data layers. GGP GIS is widely used within Planning; for applications, constraints, vetting and strategy, Amenities; for contaminated land, fly tipping and grounds maintenance and Environmental Health; for pest control and commercial food outlets, for example. GGP GIS is also used to access and maintain spatial data from external organisations such as English Heritage and the Environment Agency.

Rother also utilise GGP’s Gazetteer Management Software to provide access to up to date address records ensuring accuracy and consistency of service provision.

“This project is by no means over as we have ambitious plans to increase the speed of data loading and the running of spatial queries by migrating data overlays to PostgreSQL Spatial rather than the current non spatial formats,” concluded Andrew Gale.

CONTACTS:

GGP Systems, tel +044 (0)208 686 9887, www.ggpsystems.co.uk