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From CAD User AEC Magazine  Vol 18 No 03 - MARCH/APRIL 2005

Cadcorp’s Spatial Information System provides a good example of an integrated infrastructure environment, as can be seen with Poole and Redditch Borough Councils, and Welsh Health Estates.

When an engineer in the Highways and Transportation Department at the Borough of Poole, on the south coast of England, needs to find information on a Traffic Regulation Order he no longer needs to go to one of several plan chests and search for the appropriate map, or maps. He simply turns to his desktop computer and within seconds, automatically gets all the information he needs displayed there right in front of him. Within the Borough of Poole there are somewhere in the region of 2500 streets. Around 1000 of these have some kind of Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) on them. Keeping track of existing TROs, revising them when necessary and planning new ones is a major task which has been helped enormously by the introduction of a GIS based on Cadcorp SIS.

Before the system was introduced everything was done using paper Ordnance Survey maps. The process was slow and prone to errors and inconsistencies. For example, where a street carried on over two or more map sheets, inconsistencies could occur with a TRO not being continued correctly from one map sheet to the next. Furthermore, the maps quickly became illegible through hand drawn changes, corrections and alterations. All of this meant that several weeks could pass from the time a TRO was made to it being implemented.

Now, however, everything is done with the GIS and is almost instantaneous, with new and amended TROs able to be prepared consistently and accurately in advance of their confirmation coming through.

But GIS in Poole’s Highways and Transportation Department goes much further than the management of Traffic Regulation Orders. For example, over 18,500 items of street furniture, including their descriptions and location, have been captured and added to the GIS database. The GIS development team at Poole created a symbols library covering each item and carried out the actual data capture work internally. This street furniture database has been linked to the Borough of Poole’s highway maintenance records to enable them to streamline their maintenance planning procedures and improve efficiency. With this facility it is possible to specify the required spare parts and materials for a job without needing to carry out a physical inspection on site beforehand, because the database holds all the necessary information.

In addition to these GIS-based applications, the extensive computer-aided design and drafting (CAD) facilities built into the Cadcorp SIS software have proved invaluable in the planning of traffic calming schemes. A specific instance is an award-winning scheme in an area of Poole known as Parkstone, where there are over 100 traffic restrictions within some 30 streets. The scientific planning of where to place the restrictions, the spacing between them and the different types required was performed with Cadcorp SIS and the software's CAD facilities were then used to produce the layout drawings for use by the Engineering Department. This not only saved time but also ensured that what had been planned was what was actually constructed.

Redditch Borough Council.
Cadcorp SIS is also at the heart of Redditch Borough Council’s corporate-wide system designed to provide both geographic information system (GIS) and computer-aided design/drafting (CAD) facilities to its various operational departments. With its planning, engineering, cleansing/landscape, highways and estates departments the first to use the Cadcorp SIS-based system for their day-to-day operations, the Council then extended its use to other departments, including building control, land charges, environmental health and amenities, among others.

Redditch had a number of objectives which any system needed to satisfy. In addition to the ability to interface to the Council’s existing Reality database and to provide an up-to-date applications development environment, the new system also needed to provide comprehensive detail drafting facilities as well as the expected digital mapping and GIS capabilities.

As the Council’s systems development advisor at the time of the system selection explained, “We didn’t want to have two separate systems - one for mapping and GIS applications for planning, land charges, building control and estates management etc. and another for CAD applications for civil engineering works and the like. It was important that any new system should be capable of delivering both of these requirements in a fully integrated manner.”

The system is now up and running in a number of departments. For example, it is used in the planning department for the processing of planning applications, using a gazzeteer program developed jointly by Cadcorp and its a specialist applications developer for access to the Reality database. In the estates department it is used for property management, in terms of checking for ownership and rents etc., while in the engineering department it is used to produce engineering drawings and contract information for civil engineering works.

Welsh Health Estates.
Another take on the subject is provided by Welsh Health Estates (WHE), a government support body for the National Assembly for Wales (NAW), which has selected Cadcorp SIS for a project aimed at exploiting the benefits that GIS can bring to the analysis of health service facilities.
WHE provides support to the National Assembly for Wales in all health estates issues and assists National Health Service (NHS) Trusts in developing and maintaining their facilities. The data and information supplied to these bodies is central to the strategic health planning process at all levels. Both the government and WHE have recognised that the effectiveness of this role can be greatly strengthened through the use of GIS. By displaying estate information on a map, strategic health planners will be provided with powerful visual information which is easy to interpret and manipulate according to different estate attributes in order to provide particular analyses of interest.
So far, data and information collected and disseminated by WHE relates solely to NHS properties. Recent broader-ranging health policies, however, require a better understanding of the wider health estate. This includes facilities and resources that are not completely part of the NHS but which may have an impact on the delivery of health services. Examples of such facilities are private hospitals, GP practices, pharmacies, dentists, local authority nursing homes, private residential care homes and others.
At present WHE’s primary interest relates to estates data and information focused on the location, physical condition, energy performance and statutory compliance of NHS properties. It is planned that this interest should be extended to cover health related non-NHS properties and it is also possible that WHE will include a limited amount of health services data.
Longer term, social statistics could be included in the system, which would enable the distribution of health facilities in general to be mapped and analysed in conjunction with the characteristics and requirements of the communities served.

Cadcorp Spatial Information System
Cadcorp’s Spatial Information System product suite includes desktop, Web and developer software offerings, all originating from one single source code base guaranteeing across-the-board product compatibility. The latest release of Cadcorp SIS, Version 6.1, provides an established product mix of 'off the shelf' modules - Map Viewer, Map Manager, Map Editor and Map Modeller, and a new module, Map Reader, a free GIS viewer.

Map Reader allows users to display and print all formats supported by Cadcorp SIS, previously saved to a Published Window Definition (PWD) file in the higher level Map Manager, Map Editor or Map Modeller products.

Cadcorp ASC (Active Server Component) extends the functionality of Cadcorp SIS for use over the Internet or a company-wide intranet. It is a dynamic, server-side Web-based GIS, not merely a map-publishing tool for pre-authored images, providing an interactive Web-based solution for real time map creation and analysis. Cadcorp ASC is designed for the Microsoft Information Service ASP environment and is implemented widely around the world. With Version 6.1, it is joined by Cadcorp GeognoSIS.NET, extending the dynamic functionality of Cadcorp SIS for use over the Internet or a company-wide intranet utilising the .NET development environment, or other HTTP- and SOAP-based languages, such as Java.

Apart from its single source code base from desktop to Web, which provides seamless integration across the product range, Cadcorp SIS provides native support for over 100 CAD, GIS, raster and database formats 'out-of-the-box'. No additional-cost translators or middleware is required for Cadcorp SIS to import and export the industry's widest range of data formats, including ESRI ArcView Shapefiles, SDTS, MapInfo TAB, MapInfo MIF/MID, DXF, DWG, OS NTF and Mastermap, FME, XML and GML, GeoTiff, ECW, Oracle Spatial 9i and many, many more.
www.cadcorp.com
 

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