Good afternoon and here is this week’s update on the webmap development preview for Greater Christchurch.
Since our last post a lot more work has been completed on the Main South Line section and accordingly it is in fact complete except for any errors that are discovered and need to be resolved. Work has also completed on nearly all of the Main North Line part of the Greater Christchurch rail corridors and will be finished by the end of this week. Map drawing is going ahead quickly after solving some technical issues with the GIS software platform.
When we create the actual preview, which we hope will be finished by Christmas or the end of the year, there will be a couple of additional developments to implement.
Firstly that we are considering evaluating another hosting platform. This will not change the current form of the maps, i.e. webmaps, and it will run in parallel with the present web hosting platform whilst we evaluate a full migration by the third quarter of 2021 because we will have to decide which platform is more suited to the product. There is one advantage of the current platform that they have a base in NZ but that is just one consideration.
The second is that we will move towards integrated seamless maps that cover the whole country, not a country divided into 12 volumes. Historically we have used the 12 volumes because of technical limitations both for the physical publication at a reasonable size, and because of issues with the software’s own resource limitations. The likely outcome is whilst the webmaps will be integrated seamlessly into the whole country, the map development will continue to be in 12 volumes as well as hardcopy publications. However the public will only see integrated webmaps and 12 physical volumes produced. There are a lot of issues integrating supporting resources that we have edited into a seamless single set of webmaps so this is not so straightforward to bring together. Fortunately we only have this small part of the maps fully developed for Greater Christchurch and will be moving into other integrations as each set of maps is developed. We will probably move to create basic diagram webmaps for the whole country first and foremost, and then work on the rest of the webmaps over time.