Getmapping participated in the well organised and attended PSMA Regional Conference at the Imperial War Museum earlier this month where we chatted with PSMA members about how they are using PSMA data for the benefit of their local communities.
Against a back drop of iconic aircraft, delegates heard updates from BEIS and Ordnance Survey together with an in-depth case study based keynote presentation from North Lincolnshire Council. This majored on how they incorporate PSMA (Public Sector Mapping Agreement) data to put geospatial information at the core of both their decision making processes and their customer support services.
New to this series of conferences was the Partner Panel Discussion, where representatives from the exhibitor partner organisations, including Getmapping, fielded question from the assembled delegates (in a format familiar to the BBCs “Question Time”). This proved a success with a number of PSMA related issues being debated.
One common theme to emerge was that despite being given access to some of the best GIS (geographical information system) data available, Local Authorities are unable to make good use of it due to staff cuts leading to GIS managers being overloaded with admin tasks.
A clear solution to this would be to take their PSMA data as a managed data feed from Getmapping in the form of a WMS or WFS data stream. This would remove the burden of loading, updating and managing the data, thereby giving the GIS team the time to creatively use the mapping to its best advantage.
