Today I made the keynote presentation to the Jersey GIS User Conference, organised by Digimap (an Ordnance Survey partner) and the States of Jersey Government, who together are really driving forward the use of Geographic Information.
Much like OS Mastermap, Jersey now has a complete intelligent feature based geospatial database, with high levels of currency and consistency. Again like Great Britain, there is an active GPS framework network providing centimetre accuracy positioning.
In contrast to the rest of the UK, Jersey with a single layer of government, has just got on a built a single land and property address database which is widely adopted and has become the standard for government use.
Half of the possible 8000 government employees access the sole corporate geospatial Intranet and on the sister Island of Guernsey the utilities companies are beginning to publish their assets to single password protected website.
None of these things are technically difficult to do, but the contrast with the UK is interesting – this really is the case of the relatively small size of the channel islands and simpler organisational structures making the exploitation of Geographic Information much quicker to deliver benefits.
Written and submitted from the Hotel L’Horizon, Jersey, using the hotels wifi broadband internet connection.
BBC Radio 4’s flagship breakfast radio show, the