Industry: Government and public sector

Location: Colombia

The Ministry of Culture is the governing body of the Colombian cultural sector and its objective is to formulate, coordinate, execute and monitor the State's policy on cultural matters. It is an organization that acts in good faith, with ethical integrity and observes current regulations for the benefit of the community and its own officials. The Ministry of Culture will promote a creative and responsible Colombia for its memory, where all citizens are capable of interacting and cooperating with opportunities for creation, enjoyment of cultural expressions, in conditions of equity and respect for diversity.

Cultural Map is a multiplatform solution that allows the ministry to present information of cultural interest to the community and in turn capture and generate control of activities by the different areas that make up this ministry.

"The geographic presentation of information with high availability, gives value and leverages interest and a sense of belonging."
John Saavedra, Project Leader Engineer, Mincultura.

• As a business strategy, Google Maps Platform As a tool, it provides the information geolocation strategy and its APIs make success simple and possible.
• Availability reached of 99.999 percent.
• Reduced network latency.
• 60 days of development from concept to creation.

• Maps JavaScript API: allows the visualization of the map itself. From this API, users can view any result of information on places of cultural interest or activities obtained through the Google Maps APIs that we want to implement.
• Street View API: Insert real images with 360 degree panoramas improving the user experience, and the user sees in more detail what the site of cultural interest offers, additionally it allows them to segment and define their cultural destination based on the information provided by this service.
• API Directions: calculates the distance and time to go from one point A to another B and displays the optimal indications of travel. It helps users to plan routes to go to visit the cultural sites of the country.
• Autocomplete (Places API): provides predictions based on search location in anticipation of full address typing. This system of validation of addresses and / or sites of interest, reduces the margin of error in typing and thus the margin of abandonment of the search.
• Details (Places API): It offers details of the establishments and / or points of interest such as opening hours, rating, prices, etc. that is close to the information displayed on the cultural map.
• Geocoding API: Convert addresses to geographic coordinates and vice versa. Within the system, the cultural map will show us places of cultural interest or activities near an address entered by the user.

To present, manage and standardize information of cultural interest online, Mapa Cultural establishes the criteria and means to carry out the information integration activities through the implementation of Google's cutting-edge technology. Cultural Map requires generating a social impact of knowledge and appropriation of the sites and activities that make up the Colombian cultural framework. After a review, Mapa Cultural decided to move its map development environment to Google Maps Platform (GMP). “We opted for GCP for three main reasons: we only had to use what we needed when we needed it; performance met our requirements; and we could easily climb «, testimony of the Eng Leader of Projects in Mincultura.

Ministry of Culture of Colombia, was very interested in creating a platform that would allow the presentation of information to citizens regarding the component of cultural interest that Colombia has, both at an architectural level and the activities and social developments that it carries out as an entity. The solution was evaluated with GCP components and Cultural Map was created, deployed as multiplatform services that today provides the scope expected by the Ministry. The instances managed from the Google cloud provide the services used to run the Cultural Map on its different platforms, in conjunction with the integration of the Ministry's own information services.