Press Releases

To the Ns of the earth.

13/05/2000

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ESRI (UK) scores hat-trick in recent ‘N’ procurements and supports other national initiatives. Something that is believed to be unprecedented in the history of GIS in this country has happened: a single vendor, ESRI (UK), has been successful in a number of recent procurements of national importance. In the last three months, it has been awarded contracts for the development of a pilot system for the National Joint Utilities Group (NJUG), and the development and hosting of a metadata gateway to geographic information National Geo-Spatial Data Framework (NGDF), and, last but not least, ESRI (UK) is at the time of writing on the final shortlist of four consortia bidding to provide a National Land Information Service (NLIS). As well as being successful in these competitive situations, ESRI (UK) continues to be supportive of other standards-led national initiatives, in particular by significant investment in land and property gazetteer tools to support the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) and the National Land Use Database (NLUD). At the beginning of the millennium, GIS in this country is now entering a significant new era. Many organisations are looking beyond stand-alone and isolated desktop applications to see how they can better integrate systems to facilitate better access to information and obtain greater value from data assets by sharing geographic data within and between organisations. The success that ESRI (UK) has achieved in these ‘N’ factor projects confirms both the capability of the company and the suitability of the products it supplies to meet these new challenges. NJUG Utility asset information is both extremely large in volume and extent and also very valuable to both the utility company that owns each pipe or cable and the many other utilities and organisations that will encounter such structures as they go about their day-to-day work. The goal of the National Joint Utilities Group project is to use Internet technology to facilitate the exchange of records of networks of underground assets. A key element of this initiative is to enable the location of plant to be notified when undertaking excavations. ESRI (UK) has been successful in winning the contract to develop an initial pilot system. Based on ESRI’s Internet Map Server software, it will be a fully distributed and scalable system, handling requests for delivery of information in real time and within a robust and secure environment. If the trial is successful, it is expected that the utilities will then roll the system out nationally. Look out for an update on this project in future issues of ESRI (UK) News. NGDF The board of the National Geo-Spatial Data Framework awarded a three-year contract to ESRI (UK) to develop and host a web-based gateway to geographic information in the UK. A key objective of NGDF is to provide greater awareness of and access to geographic information. The initial system is expected to go live soon and users will be able to search on a map of the UK to identify locations of interest and combine this information with text and keyword searches to bring back details of different themes of data that are available. Users might, for example, be interested in services in rural communities or social exclusion or land development. The Internet search will identify the suppliers and summaries of all the datasets of interest. In these cases, the relevant facts might revolve around environmental data, demographics, lifestyle information, land and property ownership, retail outlets, mapping, land use, travel times or business information. In addition to the development of the core routines, ESRI (UK)’ will also host the gateway’s web site and provide maintenance and support for what is hoped will be an ever-expanding service with all the major public and private sector organisations contributing. The service, which will be free to the user, has been initially funded by the government’s Invest to Save Budget and is a component of government policy which aims at providing electronic access to 100% of government data by 2008. NLIS Last but not least in this trio of ‘N’ initiatives which have been undertaken as competitive procurement to ensure best solution and best value, is the National Land Information Service, probably the most significant e-government initiative which is currently being undertaken. NLIS aims to bring simplicity and speed to the process for buying house and commercial property by using information technology to ‘join up’ all the government and commercial parties involved in the conveyancing. ESRI (UK) have teamed up with PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world’s largest professional services organisation, to form a joint venture that will provide a national service for performing on-line searches of property information. The new service – under the banner of Official Search – will make official information held by the Land Registry, local authorities, utilities and other bodies available over the Web. It will allow solicitors and local authorities to deliver faster, better, more transparent services to people and organisations moving property. Official Search will also provide a one-stop shop for a wide range of land and property data including neighbourhood information on schools, doctors and dentists. An announcement by the Lord Chancellor’s department in February confirmed that the PricewaterhouseCoopers–ESRI consortium was one of only four consortia that had been shortlisted to bid for an NLIS licence. This announcement followed consideration of the many proposals that had been received in response to a prospectus issued under European procurement procedures. Central to the consortium’s bid is a planned investment to encourage local authorities to get on-line so that the period from agreement to proceed to exchange of contracts can be completed very quickly. Dr Richard Waite, a director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said: ‘The future of conveyancing will marry traditional values of professionalism and independence with new age convenience and efficiency.’ Andy Coote, consultancy services director, ESRI (UK) added: ‘The speed with which we are moving into the e-business age means that radical improvements to the property-buying process are now possible – it simply needs vision and drive to deliver them.’ Official Search has chosen Global Crossing (UK), Vertex Data Science and Wragge & Co. as sub-contractors to assist in the development and provision of the service. Licence award is expected later this year. For more information about NLIS, visit www.nlis.org.uk/nlistoda.htm NLPG, NSG & NLUD Of increasing and fundamental importance in the implementation of multi-user and multi-organisational systems is the use of geo-spatial data which is not only up to date but which has been captured and maintained to adopted national standards. Without standards how can one utility share data with another (e.g., if they are not referring to streets in the same way)? How can solicitors be sure that they are asking the Land Registry for the right title deed of the property you want to buy? Unless every local authority is using a common data model to capture the extent and details of brown-field sites how can central government bring together quickly a national register of such land to help develop the right house-building strategy? Over the last few years, the Local Government Association (LGA) through its Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) has taken a lead role, in conjunction with other organisations, to develop such standards for data, at the same time as encouraging local authorities and other users to adopt these standards to facilitate better integration, sharing and exchange of information. The most significant standards which have now been put in place are for the National Land and Property Database (NLPG), the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) and the National Land Use Database. But the definition of a standard in itself is not enough. Software tools are needed to enable local authorities and others to capture, maintain and output data that is compliant with the standards. This is an area where ESRI (UK) has made a significant effort in research and development, which has resulted in the creation of its LPG Tools solutions for managing land, property and street data. As an extension to ArcView, LPG tools brings all the ease of use of ArcView into a unified application environment that has been accredited by the IDeA for its conformation with the BS7666 standard, which underpins the gazetteer information. LPG Tools has also been accredited by the NLUD Partnership. It is currently the only fully integrated application which can capture both textual and graphical information in a single environment, as opposed to other solutions which require a user to be familiar with two applications so that the sofotware can ‘pick’ polygons that match separately entered attribute data. For more information about IDeA information and standards initiatives, visit their web site at www.idea-infoage.gov.uk, email info@idea.gov.uk or telephone on 020 7296 6666. For information on NLUD tools, visit www.nlud.org.uk/tech/table.htm, or email enquiries@nlud.org.uk. For information on LPG Tools, telephone ESRI (UK) on 01296 745550.