London, 8^th November 2012 – London Borough of Harrow has been announced the winner of the Overall Exemplar Award 2012 at the annual GeoPlace ‘Everything Happens Somewhere’ Conference.

The Award, which was presented at the Central London ceremony on 25^th October 2012, is considered the most prestigious of all the Awards as it was voted for by the 320 delegates in attendance.

Asked to select the overall winner from those councils who had won individual awards on the day, the delegates considered the outcomes of the work done, the use of gazetteers, relevance to improving public service and the overall ‘wow’ factor of each winning entry.

Impressed by Harrow’s innovative approach to gazetteer integration that saw them create an intranet based LLPG (Local Land and Property Gazetteer) portal with multiple LLPG based web services at its core, the delegate vote saw them emerge victorious.

Developed in only three weeks at a cost of little more than £2,100, the new system facilitated the removal of a third party system, which will see them recognise savings in excess of £15,000 over a five year period.

In addition to these direct, cashable savings, Harrow designed the new system to increase the visibility and use of the LLPG, improving both information exchange and workflow. Not only can other council departments now seamlessly access the data, and through that remove possible errors and the duplication of work, but these other departments are now able to feedback their own information to the central LLPG hub.

This ‘cross reference candidate process’ allows teams across the council to assign their own systems’ cross references to LLPG properties, which are then flagged to the LLPG Custodian. Once validated and approved, these cross references can be imported into the council’s gazetteer management system with the click of a button, all done in compliance with nationally recognised standards.

Speaking of the Award, LLPG Custodian at London Borough of Harrow, Luke Studden, said, “We embarked on this project because we firmly believe that the LLPG becomes a valuable asset when it is utilised, yet becomes an invaluable one when it is integrated and when those integrations are leveraged.”

“Credit for this Award has to go to the whole of the Web and GIS teams as it has been their hard work and dedication that has seen this project become such a success. It is because of their efforts that this council will continue to make significant savings long into the future.”

For more information, visit www.geoplace.co.uk

About GeoPlace

GeoPlace is a public sector limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey. GeoPlace’s role is to create and maintain the National Address Gazetteer and the National Street Gazetteer for England and Wales, providing definitive sources of publicly-owned spatial address and street data for Great Britain. Through agreement with Scotland’s Improvement Service Company, coverage has been extended to include Scotland’.