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Background
The ability of web mapping to quickly publish your data to the web within a fully interactive and dynamic mapping system makes it a powerful promotional and information provision tool. Free Google and Microsoft aerial imagery resources provide a fantastic backdrop for your data. In addition to the mapping and aerial imagery supplied by Google, it is possible to add in your own Ordnance Survey or other maps. This means that rights of way and other countryside information can be shown against a backdrop of large scale mapping such as OS MasterMap or OS Landline.
Users can use intuitive ‘tick boxes’ to show and hide different types of information, can zoom, pan, search for nearest places and ‘interrogate’ mapped items to show more information, images and web links.
Historically, publishing your data in this high tech way was a difficult business (requiring powerful servers and expensive software and mapping licences) - but not any more. Rapid improvements in the underlying technology and the availability of free mapping data and services have made this a very affordable solution. As a specialist consultancy in this area, web mapping projects that would have cost £10,000 a few years back are now being delivered for well under £3,000
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Examples
If you would like to see an example of a simple and low cost path mapping solution, please click here.
The example will open in a new window. To get a quick overview of functionaility try the following 6 step test:
- Tick 'promoted route' and click 'Show me' and then click on one of the red highlighted routes to see info box. Most have a web link in the box.
- Search for 'Clipsham' in the gazetteer, and then zoom in a couple of levels using slider control (map top left)
- Find the nearest pubs and select the 'The Olive Branch'
- Switch to hybrid view (map top right
- Click on one of the green paths to show info box and then select the email tab on the info box. Close box using 'x' - please don't send an email!
- Tick 'infrastructure' and click 'Show me' and then click on one of the furniture items. Most have a thumbnail (not all), click on this to see the full size image
Webmapping is also useful in heritage applications, as can be seen in this example from the Western Isles, or in this example from Norfolk.
Some more examples can be found in our portfolio
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Licensing
Mapping and aerial imagery from both Google and Microsoft is generally free for non-commercial use, providing the published mapping is publicly available. Restricted access or commercial use is also allowed, but a licensing fee is payable.
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Costs
Set up costs £1,950 for the core system - this is a one off cost.
- Discussion about your requirements, data and confirm system specification1
- We receive your map, text and photo data, undertake basic data cleaning & processing as required (up to 1 day) 2
- Create a dedicated WebMapping site on our London servers and upload your data
- Create web page to match corporate style (if required)
- Set up gazetteer, line styles, etc
- Test and publish (you can then embed within, or link from your corporate website)
Licensing and hosting costs £1,650 for the core system - this is an annual cost.
- Annual license
- Provide hosting services for your data on our London servers
- Maintain system
Optional additions
|
Option
|
Set up
|
Licensing and hosting
|
|
Additional layers based on supplied data
|
£275
|
£95
|
|
'Find my nearest' functionality 3
|
£750
|
£170
|
|
Additional bespoke user consultation / comment form – up to 10 fields 4
|
£995
|
£250
|
|
Data updates (per update on demand)
|
£275
|
£0
|
|
Data updates (up to 5 per year – pre paid)
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£995
|
£0
|
|
Direct access to your data allowing you to update as often as you wish
|
£1,500
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£495
|
|
Data backup5 (daily & weekly off site)
|
£275
|
£495
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| Photos and / or hyperlinks (up to 3 layers) |
£500 |
£130 |
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VAT is not included
Fixed prices include a 20% discount for orders received prior to October 2008
1 Discussion can be remote or at our offices in Talgarth. We can attend your offices, but this will incur additional costs
2 Data would be expected in electronic form, ideally, but not neccessarily in an industry standard GIS format. We can however look at capturing data from paper sources if required, but this would be likely to require additional resources. If additional work is required then a firm quotation would be provided on receipt of data for review. The fixed price would typically include up to 4 'layers' of information or themes.
3 'Find my nearest' functionality is based on up to 3 information themes (a theme is basically a dataset - e.g. find my nearest nature reserve) and also includes up to 1 day of data preparation. If additional data processing is required then a firm quotation would be provided on receipt of data for review.
4 A simple, spatially enabled response form is already included in the fixed price.
5 This should only really be required if you do not hold up to date copies of your data, or if re-supplying these would be a problem
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Technical notes
If you have limited point data (or simple boundaries) then these can be created as a 'layer' within your browser. Really quick and simple to build, but only works well for low volume data (above 200 objects and the browser starts to grind a bit). For higher volumes (which includes rights of way networks), we have found that data is best ‘served’ as WMS (Web Mapping Services) fed through a proxy server which addresses some of the edge effects that can otherwise occur with WMS tiles. Querying functionality such as ‘find my nearest’ requires the data to be held in a spatially enabled database. We presently use the open source ‘MapServer’ to serve WMS and postGIS for spatially enabled data
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What next?
If you would like to place an order, receive further information or simply to discuss your ideas then please contact:
Jon Young
jony@esdm.co.uk
(01874) 713068 (direct)
(01874) 711145 (general office)
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Download
Please click here to download a PDF document about our web mapping service
Images
These are static images taken from some of the web mapping projects that we have worked on. If you would like to see a real example, please click here.
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