Data Share Connections

Owned by Kim Stimpson
Last updated: 01 Mar, 2018
2 min read

Data Share is the iShare data harvesting engine providing live and scheduled access to a multitude of data sources including spatial data warehouses, standard databases, standard geo file formats, spreadsheets and RSS Feeds.

Integration, so long the bugbear of organisations with multiple systems, is becoming easier and can mean huge cost savings for councils. Data Share integrates with ESRI CAPS/ArcSDE and other established spatial data warehouse solutions and can pull data from over 50 other established council systems. Data Share extracts data from back office systems and caches it into a separate open source database used by iShare. Key applications remain completely unaffected creating a resilient solution for public facing applications especially services delivered through council websites.

Data Share includes a Workflow module so that data can be manipulated prior to publication, transformations include spatial joins, geocoding, anonymisation and aggregation. Data Share is also extendable through the use of standard scripts.

Data Share is able to pull data from over 50 established software systems

Data Share Connections are used if you have non spatial data that you wish to use in iShare and are configured using iShare Studio. For instance you may want to:

  • Present the data in My House / My Nearest
  • Join the data to an existing spatial dataset
  • Spatialise the data, if it contains Easting / Northing or Long / Lat as opposed to geometry type
  • Make the data accessible through the iShare API or Publisher

This is where connections to external systems are configured, and selected data is synchronised or copied into the iShare PostgreSQL database.

Data Share works well with known database types such as PostgreSQL, etc. however to use Data Share with a number of other types requires using some specialised settings e.g.