South Dublin County Council (SDCC)

2006-11-23

South Dublin County Council (SDCC) is the first local authority in the country to make its website geo enabled so that the public can use the mapping technology to check planning applications and a range of other services.

This feature lets citizens type in an address within the South Dublin area and find public facilities closest to them, such as crèches, playing fields or schools.  It also works for private businesses listed in SDCC’s database – essentially any of the 6,000 rate-paying companies in the area – so that people can also find nearby shops and other services.

Like several local authorities in Ireland, SDCC had already been using a number of different geographical information (GI) environments. Initially the council had rolled out technology from ESRI Ireland to enable the mapping and basic GIS functionality through web browsers to users within the organisation.
The main application is the mapping client that lets users view and interrogate a wide range of data used by SDCC. The geographical information includes ordnance survey mapping, planning information, the drainage network, street lighting, refuse collection, details and the road network.

Recently the council extended this to provide an online planning application mapping facility to the public at www.sdublincoco.ie. This lets citizens query and display local planning applications for their area and is the first time a local authority in Ireland has offered such a service via the Internet.  The SDCC site also lets people check the electoral register and then see on a map where their nearest polling station is. 

“This is particularly far ahead in the local authority arena.  No one in the Republic has yet gone as far as this,” commented Eamonn Doyle, principal consultant with ESRI Ireland. Only North Down in Northern Ireland has implemented a similar system, as have 30 councils in the UK.

Noting the hype around an application like Google Earth, Doyle remarked: “What we’ve found, with South Dublin, is that they were able to unlock their data vaults and publish this information on the map”, he told siliconrepublic.com.

He added that the site is interactive so that it’s not just for pushing information out to the citizens but that the same is true in reverse, as people can report faults such as potholes or faulty street lamps back to the county council.  This part of the project can bring a quick return on investment as North Down council found that this feature reduced fault reporting calls to its helpdesk by 15 and 20pc.