CHKcartoplus - Background

CHKcartoplus - Cook Hammond & Kell’s answer

During the latter part of the 20th century local authorities recognised the need for ‘cartographically enhanced’ presentation Proposals Maps on the council's website that could improve on the limited graphic capabilities of all GIS packages.

For many years Cook Hammond & Kell were producing presentation quality maps for Development Plan Proposals Maps on paper using GIS data as source via desk top publishing. This effectively lost the ‘intelligence’ of the GIS while creating the presentation image.

At the same time, because of central government’s ‘e-government’ requirements  local authorities were beginning to demand websites that would show the statutory Proposals Map and allow the user to ask questions of the map and search to find a specific address or type of policy. Where is it? and what is it?

The technology of website production at the time involved tiling large graphic files and laborious hyperlinking which had to be repeated each time the map was revised.

In response to the need to find a way of retaining the intelligence of the GIS while producing presentation quality cartography Cook Hammond & Kell developed CHKcartoplus.