Installation and support of the HDC system was handled by the UK office of SBS in Bracknell. Reaching a wider audience Traditionally, the most comprehensive and time-consuming task of GIS development is capturing and digitising data. HDC's experience was no exception. First, staff had to digitise all mapped constraint data - 60 map layers and 23,000 polygons corresponding to features such as sewer lines, gas pipelines, tree preservation orders, zoning boundaries and public footpaths, as well as 140,000 planning history records. Completed in 1993, the exercise effectively condensed a 10-year process into three.
Tucker alludes to the difficulties.
We therefore had to devise and implement a policy for addressing that could be applied on an authority-wide basis. Tucker explains why. Historically the department maintained 20 different sets of maps that held details of every planning application. Staff had to trawl through all those map sets for each application and identify if there were any pertinent issues to be considered. That process took about three days.