Safer overnight lorry scheduling, smarter territory management from MapMechanics

BRENTFORD, U.K. - Sept. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- Safer overnight parking on long lorry journeys and more intelligent network planning and territory management are two advances brought by new data sets launched by MapMechanics, the UK-based specialist in mapping and geographical data.

They are all available direct from MapMechanics or through www.allmapdata.com, the company’s industry-leading transactional web site for digital mapping, Oracle map data solutions, geodemographic data and business data.

A third new data product launched by the company, the GeoLytix Education Pack, offers an ideal resource for using the location of places of learning across the UK in market analysis and planning.

The HGV Parking data set consists of more than 680 overnight parking locations in Great Britain that are suitable for use by large goods vehicles (those generally known as HGVs). It includes garages, car parks, laybys, motorway services, truck stops and industrial estates, and provides additional information such as the latitude and longitude of each location, the number of parking spaces available and the cost of use.

The data set also includes detailed comments where appropriate, such as “Tesco across the road, but a longish walk into town”.

It is ideal for use with routing and scheduling optimisation systems or other journey planning products, allowing these to build multi-day journeys that end each day within reach of a suitable lorry park. It is updated quarterly.

MapMechanics’ Unit Postcode Adjacency lookup data set is a lookup table that cross-references all 1.695 million unit postcodes in Great Britain with adjacent unit postcodes – even when these are on higher or lower floors of the same building (in vertical streets, as this situation is known).

This data can be invaluable in confirming or contradicting guesswork about adjacency. It shows, for instance, that BA7 7PY is next to TA11 7HG, but that SW12 9HZ and SW13 0JF are not adjacent. It is therefore ideal in business intelligence, territory management and logistics planning.

Because these relationships are inherent in the data set, users are saved from the need to buy extra data or software or perform geographic analysis on existing data simply in order to establish which postcodes are next to each other.

The GeoLytix Education Pack provides detailed information about libraries and educational establishments across the UK, presenting a wealth of detail such as geographical coordinates, telephone number, street address and web address. It includes libraries, universities, further education colleges (in this case for England only), and primary and secondary schools.

This data can be invaluable in performing catchment analysis, market analysis, trend analysis and similar exercises where the focus is on the location and concentration of people attending educational institutions or visiting places of learning. It is available under flexible licensing conditions that can take account of internet and intranet use.

For the educational establishments, a wealth of useful is provided in separate data fields, including county, postcode, telephone number, UCAS code, UPRN code, ONS code, postgraduate/undergraduate role, number of 16-18 year olds enrolled, web address, school code, age of youngest/eldest pupil, number of pupils, and school classification (private, state, special, college).

Not only does MapMechanics source and supply data of this kind; under its Process Promise scheme the company often also processes and formats the data for specific users, for example closing boundaries so that they can be used to make a shaded trend map, or linking roads so they are suitable for use in routing applications, saving them the need to do the job.