and presents the results of the most comprehensive survey of English football pitches ever conducted. Already the site lists over 22,000 sites with around 45,000 football pitches, and the Foundation is currently encouraging schools to come forward and check the accuracy of their details, or submit unlisted facilities for future inclusion in the database.
The prime objectives of the exercise have been to help local authorities and other interested bodies to formulate plans for the provision of local sports facilities, and to highlight areas where external funding is needed. But the site also helps make football more accessible to the general public, who can access the main sections free of charge to find out more about facilities in any area of interest.
Digital mapping lies at the heart of the Web site. Visitors can home in on areas of interest by entering town, postcode or known facility name; then a map of the area is displayed, showing all the football facilities within the specified locality.
Using simply on-screen controls, visitors can then pan around the site or zoom in on specific areas, moving through six levels of mapping (of which the last-two are street-level maps). Hovering the mouse over a site (denoted by a football symbol) pops up brief details about it, and clicking on the site opens a separate screen with much fuller information.
To implement the mapping facilities, PMP chose GeoConcept Internet Server, a special Web-oriented version of GeoConcept, the leading geographic information system, which is supplied and supported in Britain by Kingswood MapMechanics.
GCIS allows the system to generate local maps on demand and deliver them over the Internet, superimposing on them the locations of individual clubs or other facilities. It has the inbuilt capability of recognising mapping calls generated by HTML in Web pages, extracting the relevant mapping from its database, adding attribute data such as pitch details, and relaying them back in compact form to the browser.
Kingswood MapMechanics has also supplied PMP with AA 1:200,000 vector and raster map datasets for creating the smaller-scale maps that users see at the outer levels of zoom. These have been supplemented with Ordnance Survey ISM street-level data for the highest two levels of zoom.
To add further value to the site, users can call up a map view of any football location, showing its exact address and giving details of how to find it.
The Football Foundation is already working on new features that will make the site even more useful to local authorities. Among them is provision for registered users to make selective searches of areas that interest them. GeoConcept is particularly well suited to this kind of function, since it is designed to handle complex geographic queries based both on textual input and on areas defined interactively by users on digital maps.
Work on the creation of the REFF database started two years ago, and involved detailed consultation with local authorities, education authorities, league clubs, parish and town councils, schools and county football associations. The total cost of the project was £2 million.
The Football Foundation itself dates back only to July 2000. It was set up by football authorities and Government to promote investment in football at grass-roots level. It is a partnership involving the FA Premier League, the Football Association and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (Sport England), who among them contribute £53 million in grant aid. The Foundation has the responsibility for distributing this.
PWC and PMP, the developers of the REFF project, have also just produced a document called Towards a level Playing Field, working on behalf of Sport England and the CCPR in partnership and in partnership with other interested parties. This aims to help local authorities formulate strategies for developing sports facilities in accordance with the Government’s PPG17 directive.
The popularity of the REFF Web site is indicated in the fact that it has already recorded no fewer than 3.5 million hits. |
