Geodata solutions provider Europa Technologies has launched a hosted mapping service to help the insurance industry react quickly to emergency situations. viaEuropa Express, to be unveiled at the ABI Biennial Conference in London, is a new online DaaS (Data as a Service) offering that brings the most detailed cartography of Great Britain direct to the desktop, web and mobile devices.
The service bridges the gap between raw data delivery and fit-for-purpose mapping. It extends the existing capabilities of the viaEuropa service to give the insurance industry rapid access to authoritative, large scale digital mapping, centred on a specific location. The challenge faced by the industry is that the actual location for which mapping is needed in response to an event is not known in advance. Reactive work has therefore to be done in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Traditionally, the only way to plan for this would be to hold a large-scale topographic map dataset for the entire country. This is expensive to license and presents significant challenges in handling the huge data volumes required. With viaEuropa Express, insurers can acquire maps for a specific area of interest and receive the data, delivered as a service, by the next business day. The area of interest is selected, costed and ordered through a web-based interface. As a result, they are able to respond rapidly to an event whenever and wherever it arises. This simplifies the integration of geographic information by delivering it directly into existing mapping applications, including support for Microsoft Bing Maps, ESRI, MapInfo, Google Maps, Mapflow and popular business intelligence platforms. Read More
