SA's Aspire Solutions, which specialises in spatial business applications, has completed a major project for ANWB, the Dutch affiliate of the global Automobile Association.
Aspire worked with traffic feed provider, TomTom, together with local partners MapIT and AAT, to design and implement a live Web app that enables Dutch commuters and travellers to plan trips both within Holland and to other destinations throughout Europe.
"ANWB's trip-planning page now brings together live traffic and weather data with information about road works, speed camera locations and traffic modelling data to give Dutch motorists an incredibly valuable resource," says Aspire MD Mike Steyn.
The value of the service is reflected in the traffic it receives, adds Steyn, who says 55% of Dutch families are members of ANWB.
"It's one of the 100 busiest Web sites in the Netherlands and this is one of the busiest pages on the site. We've designed the system to handle peak loads of several hundred hits per second."
The second phase of the project, trip planning, includes a multi-modal routing engine as well as information on public transport, walking and cycling routes so users can plan trips using all available modes of transport. It is due to launch this December, in time for Christmas.
ANWB online project manager Mike Duijvelaar says working with the South African project team "was no different than working with a colleague sitting 20 metres away.
"We made one visit to Cape Town to discuss some things face-to-face, but for most of the time, Skype, the phone and e-mail were everything we needed."
Steyn says large, complex spatial projects of this kind are now cost-effective to implement thanks to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of app-ready data feeds.
"We no longer have to worry about how to integrate huge, cumbersome data sets into our solutions," says Steyn.
"That means we can focus our attention on designing and implementing Web services apps that deliver real, fast return on investment for our customers."
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