Monday 15 June 2009

NESA on line, but not for long?

Network Rail has spent enormous amounts of time and money creating a National Electronic Sectional Appendix (NESA).

And a jolly good thing it is too.

But what's this?

To view NESA on-line you need to download the SVG Viewer from Adobe.

Alas - when you visit the download page it carries the following sorry message:

Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009.

Always good to see one legacy system replaced by another.

IT consultants, bonuses and trebles all round!

UPDATE: This from Tom over at Blairwatch
(which hasn't been updated since 8th May!):

A tad harsh - SVG is an open standard with plenty of viewer support around the place, as NR make clear.

Now, if NR had used some kooky format that you had to pay Microsoft squillions to interpret, I'd have been up for giving them a good kicking, but using SVG is common sense.

Now all we need is open access to NR's geographic data in some interestingly queryable form, plus the postcode database, the Ordnance Survey data etc... etc...