As more and more spatial web services and more and more data, are being opened to the public, it becomes vital to display more and more of transparency. How are your services working, and how is that information shared with your users? We have figured one very efficient way to relay that information for everyone to see!
Users and your IT can reach information easily
“I’m having trouble, I’m wondering if the service is working properly at the moment?”, “Is this service reliable enough to use in our application?”, “Is there any planned maintenance in the service I should be aware of?”
These can be questions your users and even your own employees might be wondering from time to time. These can be difficult to answer, and even with experienced IT personnel it can take quite a while to answer these relatively simple questions your users have. What if this information would be automatically and transparently available to everyone?
We think this kind of transparency of quality in spatial web service is vital. Your services might be used by for example first aid personnel who need that data to be reliably accessible. Achieving this kind of credibility is something you need to build slowly and maintain. Giving information about the quality of your services is one key factor when building this trust.
This is where the widgets in Spatineo Monitor can be an amazing solution for you.
Dashboard of your spatial web services
We are just going to jump to the awesome results we have witnessed our customers have been able to do. Informatie Vlaanderen from Belgium is one of our customers, who have taken the mission of transparency very seriously. They are really ahead of the game with this one. Their spatial web service dashboard (https://dashboard.informatievlaanderen.be/) is a prime example where the organisation displays openly the status of their services. The page shows the current status as well as historical availability and the information is there for everyone to see. Anyone can find this page and see themselves that Informatie Vlaanderen’s services are top notch.
We have also noticed that the “dashboard format” is quite ideal for these widgets. The layout Informatie Vlandeeren made displays all services in a neat and compact format. You can check the availability and notifications of any service in mere seconds from single page.
One of the reasons why widgets in Spatineo Monitor can be trusted is that the monitoring is performed by a third party. Spatineo tests the services by accessing the services exactly how users would access them. Therefore our monitoring gives very accurate information on how reliable those services are.
So, how to get smart with Widgets?
Displaying availability widgets is actually a really simple process with our tools. We’re not even exaggerating when we’re saying that the whole process can be done in few clicks.
Log into Spatineo Monitor, select which service you want to show, go to the sharing tab and copy the “widget loader snippet”. See the animation below for how to do it.
So now that you have the snipped copied, all you need to do is paste that into your webpage. The animation below you can see how easy it is to add the widget to a WordPress site.
Vóila, you can see the result below. This widget shows the availability of the Finnish Environment Institute’s INSPIRE Hydrography web map service.
The examples our customers have created for themselves are a little bit more complex, but anyone with basic HTML skills should be able to pull of similar layouts. Your imagination is the limit!
We would love to see your availability widgets in action! If you have implemented our solution, please share that with everyone – Examples help everyone else to achieve better transparency and assist their goals to help their own users.
You can also read more about Avaiability Widgets from our Read me- catalogue.
