Scottish Government extends viaEuropa web services agreement

viaEuropa will continue to serve all public sector organisations in Scotland, including devolved government, local authorities, police and the NHS.

Whilst still referred to as OSMA (One Scotland Mapping Agreement) Web Services, the viaEuropa services have been expanded to include data covered by the new PSGA (Public Sector Geospatial Agreement). These include mapping with OS MasterMap and OS VectorMap Local for the whole of Great Britain plus access to the OS AddressBase product family, including AddressBase Islands. viaEuropa also provides access to other valuable data products, such as content from British Geological Survey (BGS).

The viaEuropa services have been operational for over ten years and have served OSMA members for the past two years. These flexible services can be delivered directly to web applications, desktop GIS or mobile apps. While backed by 99.9% service availability guarantee, actual availability across all viaEuropa services over the past five years has been over 99.999%.

A key feature of the viaEuropa service is that it does not employ throttling or blocking, ensuring that services are not disrupted within an organisation due to a spike in activity. Such spikes are commonplace but difficult to predict, especially from public-facing websites.