Do you specifically require a bespoke website to be built, or would you consider a customised 'off-the-shelf' solution?

Yes we would consider an off the shelf product.  It would need to be flexible enough to work with our requirements but we do not specifically need a bespoke solution.

Is the PowerBI integration to be API driven, or is this a case of embedding PowerBI created visualisations within the solution? And will you provide the PowerBI license? Do they have this already and how many licenses would there need to be?

Most likely embedding visulations within the solution would be sufficient but we are open to alternative methods such as APIs. We do have a Power BI premium per capacity licence for our tenant so I don't think additional user licences would be required but we can check and confirm.

How much actual data is there to be inputted? 800,000 planning applications in the platform but how many data points are there per application?

We have approximately 270 data points for any application but in reality very few applications will have use all data points. 

What interrogation do you expect to happen with the data? Do we presume correctly that this will be just read-only access?

Yes the users must only ever have read-only access.

Do you envisage a different access level to be given to different groups? Public level 1, Planning Professionals Level 2, Local Authorities Level 3 as an example? Or all having the same read-only access?

Read-only access for all users.

What sort of ways do they want the map to be interrogated? Currently, the tender doc says a variety of ways. assuming nothing will be editable, will it be showing different answers to their questions in a map setting?

We would ideally like users to be able to input multiple filters to display the data visually on the map, also having the ability to display the data they have filtered in chart/graph/table which they can export to something like a csv file would also be useful.

Do you have scoped requirements for the work they are looking to implement with Elastic Search API?

The Elastic Search API is an open source API but we can provide details on how to connect to it and a copy of our json schema to assist with this.

With all the necessary security measures in place, will the data be able to be held by us?

We will be able to provide you the details of the Elastic Search API in order for you to download a copy of all the data on a regular basis but the core data will still need to be hosted by our current supplier.

Our product has integration with Salesforce for planning data but we can see Salesforce is not mentioned here, is that because no integration is needed to access Salesforce data?

No access to Salesforce is required for this project.

Am I right in understanding that the main objective is to create a new website that is more accessible to the general public? At the moment is it mainly just professionals from the private and public sectors that use the site? Are the drivers mainly around improving the user experience and making the website more visual and digestible so people can easily navigate the site and understand the information?

Yes this is correct. Our main objective here is to make the data more accessible and interactive for anyone interested in the data and not be reliant on having resources at their disposal to download data through APIs to get insights on the data.

Related to the above question perhaps - how are you planning to measure success for this?

This isn't easy for us to benchmark at the moment as we don't have much data on who is using the data and how often but our aim is for members of the public and planning professionals to see the Planning London Datahub as the most reliable and up to date database of development monitoring in London, through this new website. Any data that we can collect through the new system to help us see the usage of the new website would be very helpful.

Do you have any use cases of the people who are currently using the site (private and public) and how you want to improve that etc.

We can share all the information we have on this with the winning supplier and we hope that the basic user discovery at the start of the project will also help with this.