July 25, 2011 -- Huntingdonshire District Council has gone live with a new online mapping and information service supplied by Astun Technology. ‘myHuntingdonshire’ enables local residents to use their postcode or part address to find information about council services, and to locate facilities on maps. ‘myHuntingdonshire’ provides information about councillors, next bin collections, historic and new planning applications in the vicinity and much more. It is constantly refreshed with data from the Council’s service delivery systems and from a feed from Cambridgeshire County Council.
The ‘myHuntingdonshire’ facility comes courtesy of iShare, a software platform from Epsom based, Astun Technology. iShare is designed to provide public access to information via a Council’s website and is in use with over thirty Local Authorities in England and Wales. It uses a citizen’s address to link information pulled from a Council’s service delivery systems making it possible to do ‘my nearest’ searches, and find information on local facilities and services.
A fully featured mapping facility is also built in. The map, centred on the resident’s address is capable of displaying multiple layers of information, making it easy to carry out searches in a more intuitive way. iShare’s ‘MyHouse’ facility provides gives summary information drawn from the Council’s own data such as bin collection dates, Council Tax and planning applications, for the chosen location. In addition, the system also accesses data held by Cambridgeshire County Council, the first instance of such data sharing which provides a model for closer collaboration between District and County Councils in the future.
"The new ‘myHuntingdonshire’ service is part of Huntingdonshire District Council’s commitment to improving customer service and to promote the web channel,” said Joe Bedingfield, IT Development Team Leader, heading up the Web Team at the Council. “By putting information online, it means that local residents can browse for information at their own convenience and find out about the services that we provide and how they relate to their property. Citizens benefit from being able to tailor exactly what information they can view and from the wider availability of relevant data not held by the Council,” continued Joe Bedingfield.
“Whilst we have been able to pull data from other online data sources such as the NHS and the Department for Transport before, this is the first time we have used the WFS (Web Feature Service) to pull data from a neighbouring Council,” said Mike Saunt Managing Director of Astun Technology. “This is just the start of our plans for greater data sharing for our customers and paves the way for greater local collaboration, continued Saunt.
To go to ‘myHuntingdonshire’ visit www.huntingdonshire.gov.uk/myhuntingdonshire