Cadcorp has been chosen to standardise all of Midland Heart’s GIS and mapping applications including the replacement of the housing provider’s original desktop-based GIS.
James Jervis from Midland Heart said, “Housing providers continually have to balance the need to generate social as well as financial returns. GIS helps us deliver against both sets of obligations. Although we have been using GIS for a number of years, its use was limited to a few specialist staff who had desktop GIS software. We recognised that we needed a web-based application if we wanted to enable all staff to visualise internal and external datasets geographically.”
Midland Heart selected Cadcorp technology to provide not only the web mapping application but also to replace its existing desktop GIS. The new combined system will now manage the location of properties, Land Registry title polygons and land use data against background data sets which will include OS OpenData and OS MasterMap.
Jervis said, “We had two fundamental requirements. The first was that the web mapping application should be easy to use and the second was that it should be convenient to administer without the need for external involvement. Cadcorp Web Map Layers met both of these requirements. We didn’t set out to standardise on one GIS technology. We were open to proposals for web mapping applications which would co-exist with our current desktop GIS but we found that Cadcorp would allow us to coexist in the short term before eventually migrating to a standardised infrastructure.”