Projects
A selection of systems designed and built here. Two of them have their own pages; the rest are summarised below.
Grid InQuest II
In 2015 a consortium of Land & Property Services Northern Ireland, Ordnance Survey Ireland and Ordnance Survey Great Britain commissioned a desktop application and command-line tools to transform coordinates between global geodetic systems (ETRS89/WGS84) and the national systems of Britain and Ireland. The software applies the OSGM15 geoid and the OSTN15 or OSi/OSNI polynomial models as a fully three-dimensional transformation.
It is open source, with builds for Windows, Linux and macOS. Source and releases are on Bitbucket. Official binaries are also published by Ordnance Survey.
Woodland Potential Calculator
In 2010 the Forestry Commission and Natural England asked for a way to collect and present the potential for new woodland across the north west of England. Landscape units followed Natural England’s National Character Areas. Local expert groups judged opportunities and constraints in each area; the software had to support those meetings, accept typed estimates, and later roll the figures up to a regional total.
The project was extended in 2011 and adopted as a national system for England. It was the first commercial job completed here entirely under an open source licence. Application and source remain on SourceForge.
Procura site access management
In 2008 the Homes and Communities Agency commissioned a land-management system to reduce exposure to Commons Act 2007 applications. The Environment Partnership held the northern contract and, with Michell Computing, designed the procedures and the software. HCA named the suite Procura.
The field recorder was built around our own mapping engine and GPS code. Beside it sat an ArcMap reporting tool and an Access work-management database. RPS later used the same field tool in the south.
In 2011 the two regional contracts were merged. TEP won the national work and asked us to combine the databases onto one central store and to extend the field application for extra inspection types and remote transfer. Survey observations travel as custom XML into a national PostgreSQL database of HCA landholdings.
Cefn Mawr Quarry GIS
Ecoservices UK, consulting ecologists for Castle Cement, needed technical support for field surveyors and an ArcMap GIS of several seasons of biodiversity data at Cefn Mawr quarry. Heidelberg Cement, Castle Cement’s parent, later named the quarry its flagship UK biodiversity site on the strength of that analysis and presentation.
The Environment Partnership management systems
TEP ran a large family of internal Access applications that had grown for more than a decade. Michell Computing maintained them for most of that time, then redesigned the databases and moved the data onto Microsoft SQL Server.
Parallel terrain ray tracer
A research system written for Paul Michell’s MSc at Liverpool Hope University, awarded a distinction. It tested whether parallel processing could render landscape visualisations at a useful speed. The same source compiled for Windows and for Linux with GTK, and it was the first substantial project completed here entirely with open source tools.
Bassenthwaite Lake Catchment
The Environment Agency commissioned a self-running GIS viewer on CD, carrying a soil-erosion survey of the north-west Lake District. The disc went to landowners and organisations with a stake in the catchment and was used to plan remedial land management in the national park.
Sefton Coast vegetation survey
Sefton Council appointed TEP’s ecology team to survey the whole Sefton Coast. Michell Computing collated the field records into a MapInfo GIS for delivery. The project later won the Landscape Institute Award for Landscape Sciences.
Newlands data viewer
The Northwest Development Agency and the Forestry Commission asked for a GIS presentation tool for the Newlands dataset compiled by TEP. Design and implementation were done here. The viewer was used at the project launch in the Palace of Westminster.
Phoenix Trading Standards
A work-management system for trading-standards officers, written first for Wigan Borough Council and later adopted by the States of Jersey. It began in Visual Basic, moved to Access, and ran for more than ten years until an authority-wide environmental-health system replaced it.