Cadcorp Housing Conference 14 & 21/05/2019
This conference was the 2019 edition of Cadcorp’s annual Housing Conference, a day in which existing and potential Cadcorp customers from the housing sector are invited to learn about the latest advancements in Cadcorp technology, as well as a chance to network and find out how other customers have been using the software. The delegates predominantly came from social housing associations.
I gave the introductory presentation for the day, entitled ‘The Importance of Web Mapping and GIS’. This was designed to get all delegates up to speed with the basics of GIS, along with the benefits of using GIS for housing customers. To demonstrate this, I used four common examples of how GIS may be used for this purpose. They were:
- Understanding the location of your property – the benefits of spatially visualising property portfolios, as well as viewing the same data in different manners (i.e. as hotspot maps or aggregated to boundary level)
- Grounds Maintenance Manager – benefits for the Grounds Maintenance team including quick creation of new features, summarising data within neighbourhoods and creating formatted output of the results
- Land Registry / Development Opportunities – integrating with Land Registry data to view areas that could potentially be developed on as well as areas that may need to be registered with the Land Registry
- The Asset Manager – the benefits of visualising stock performance on a map to see areas of poor performance
Later in the day, I gave another presentation entitled ‘SIS Desktop: Top Rated Features’. Since the last Housing Conference, Cadcorp had released a new version of the software, therefore my session was designed to show the latest useful updates to the Desktop GIS software.
The demonstration consisted of sections on creating bivariate themes to visualise multiple attributes in the same view; hotspot maps of rent arrears; cluster point analysis of property portfolios to make visualisation of large point datasets easier; and temporal analysis of grounds maintenance costs over time.