Industrial Hypertext developed the prototype of the free-to-use online mapping application Mappa for the Aboriginal Health Council of WA.
The Mappa application helps users in country and remote areas of Western Australia to locate medical centres, doctors, nurses, and health services throughout the state, get directions to those services by road, rail, bus, and air, and view the service provider's timetables and areas of speciality in order to book a time to see those specialists.
Our mapping solutions are web based, and use OpenLayers to display maps in a web browser on any device, desktop or mobile, and PostGreSQL's PostGIS to store your spatial data in a database on the server. We can make use of the GPS built into most mobile devices to display mapping data located around the user.
For our mapping application's background tile layers we can use OpenStreetMap, which is a free source of user contributed global street data, much like Wikipedia, but we also support licensed map data sources such as Google Maps or NearMap tile backgrounds with the appropriate API key and license.
OpenStreetMap can be used to geocode an address to coordinates by querying the Nominatim webservice.
PostgresSQL combined with PostGIS offers an advanced spatial database, which being open source is free to use. Spatial databases can import traditional map data such as shape files.We can then overlay your map features, such as points, polygons, and vectors, on top of the map backgrounds. Spatial databases allow your data to be combined with mapping data in the same database so that you can run queries such as "find the closest office to a town".