UK Forestry Commission

Background

The Forestry Commission (FC) is the Government Department responsible for forestry policy throughout Great Britain.  Its mission is to protect and expand Britain's forests and woodlands and increase their value to society and the environment.  As an organization they are a mature user of GIS technology with a very sizable investment in both data and software.  Corporately they have adopted ESRI as their software provider for GIS.

Problem

The FC already had a number of bespoke ArcIMS-based web mapping applications and were increasingly aware of the time necessary to develop and support them.  They have a relatively small in-house GIS development team but a large number of potential applications. They wanted to make best use of their staff time while at the same time be in a position to rapidly deploy multiple applications across the enterprise.

Solution

The FC GIS team liked the idea that the product could be implemented very quickly by a GIS Analyst with skills in configuring XML files rather than a software developer.  Also the potential to rationalise the process of maintaining multiple different ArcIMS applications across the organisation would be very attractive.

They spent 2 months evaluating the enterprise version of IMF.  Installation was straight-forward and it was possible to develop a prototype quickly for evaluation.

Initially the GIS team had to get a sample IMF site up and running in order to show users what could be achieved.  This also provided a useful way of learning about the product.  An “out of the box” application was built very quickly by modifying some of the XML configuration files that came with the product.  This IMF based site was shown to a small number of users and their responses were very encouraging.

At the simplest level IMF is seen as a way of making centrally held spatial datasets available to a wide range of users across the Forestry Commission without the need for any specialist GIS software or user training. Taking things a step further, it is straight-forward to enable users of IMF to perform more complex spatial and attribute queries and carry out some simple analysis.  The ability to output data in various formats (e.g. PDF, Excel, GML) is also something which is attractive to the Forestry Commission.

IMF has been widely used for a variety of development projects to date often for rapid prototyping to demonstrate the potential for web mapping applications to meet business needs.  To date there are a number of operational projects in the planning stage based around IMF.  Development sites have been built and made available to users for their feedback.  Comments have been overwhelmingly positive and users are impressed with the functionality that IMF provides.  Forestry Commission are currently awaiting responses from internal customers on the final changes before being released to a wider internal audience.

In the short term it is hoped to finalize several of the applications which are currently in development.  Once a site is up and running and users across the Forestry Commission are able to see what IMF offers it is expected that more sites will follow.  The Forestry Commission holds a huge volume of spatial data and IMF is seen as an ideal way of making this accessible.  It is also hoped to expand the use of IMF from being purely internal within the Forestry Commission to having public facing sites.

Further plans involve building on the functionality that is available in IMF and looking at integrating processes which will allow for simple distributed editing of datasets held in ArcSDE.

Verdict

Gordon Maxwell, GIS Development Manager at FC concluded that "it does exactly what it says on the tin! IMF offers us a scalable enterprise framework for ArcIMS web mapping applications using shared code components - this means we can build and support our web mapping applications very effectively".

Further information


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