The French municipality of Pic St Loup, just north of Montpellier, is the most recent of more than two hundred public administrations using OpenCimetiere, an open source application for managing for managing concessions at cemeteries.
The application is developed by the French OpenMairie software project. The development of the English version, called OpenCemetery, started at the Osor Forge website in February this year.
Work on OpenCimetiere/OpenCemetery began in 2006, as a joint development project by the administrations of the cities of Arles and Albi, and the city municipality Tarn and Dadou. They where assisted by Adullact, a French organisation for civil servants involved in open source.
The application has gradually been improved and extended. The software originally supported the open source database management system MySQL, but in 2007 support for PostgreSQL was added. Improved search functionality was added in 2008 and in the same year the software was adapted to make it useful for other countries.
Cemetery concessions
According to François Raynaud, IT-director of the city of Arles, and one of the founders of the OpenMairie project, the upcoming 2.02 version of OpenCimetiere/OpenCemetery will extend the management capabilities. It will for instance help to plan which cemetery concessions are to be renewed and which are at to be ended.
Raynaud says most municipalities find OpenCemetary easy to employ. "The only thing that they need to take into account themselves, is integration with other applications."
The public administration of Arles uses OpenCimetiere to manage eight cemeteries. The software handles about 11,000 concessions and maintains records of some 32,000 deceased. The database also stores 11,000 photos and 11,000 digitised documents concerning graves and the deceased.