Business software & mapping
Tombio
A software to map and register municipal cemetery
The need
In many small French municipalities, the cemetery is run from a paper register, a yellowed plan and the memory of the town hall secretary. When a family calls to find a grave, several binders have to be opened. Knowing which plots are about to expire, or which are free, means going through the records by hand.
Existing software is often sold together with consultancy services, and some portals publish the data of the deceased widely. What was missing was a simple tool, usable by a single person, that leaves the municipality in control of its data and of what it makes public.
What I built
Tombio is a web application with nothing to install. For each cemetery, it links a map and a register:
- graves are drawn to scale on IGN aerial imagery (the French national mapping agency);
- the scanned paper plan (image or PDF) is aligned on that imagery by pointing at a few shared landmarks, a church, the corner of a path;
- each grave carries its plot details (type, holder, date, duration, condition) and the people buried there;
- searching by name, number or plot holder highlights the grave on the map;
- the register lists plot expiries and prepares renewal letters and printable registers.
A register kept in Excel or CSV is imported in one go. Drawing the map is fast: rows and grids of graves are placed in a few clicks. On a tablet or phone, GPS locates the user in the cemetery, and the application keeps working without a network: changes are sent once the connection is back.
The municipality can open a public page so that families can find a grave. It shows only names and years, never plot holders or exact dates, is not indexed by search engines, and a family can request removal.
How it works
Each cemetery has its own coordinate frame in metres, aligned with the IGN tiles: a grave is a positioned, oriented rectangle. The scanned plan is aligned by a least-squares fit (offset, rotation, scale); the remaining error is shown for each landmark, so the quality of the alignment can be judged rather than assumed.
Use is free for a municipality managed by one person, CSV export included. A support subscription, priced by population, enables teamwork, with roles and time-limited access (the length of a term of office, for example). For municipalities without time to enter their records, a digitisation service takes their documents as they are, on quotation, and nothing is delivered without their approval.
What the tool does not replace: the municipality remains responsible for its register and for legal procedures (reclaiming abandoned or expired plots), which Tombio does not handle.
What it changes
Finding a grave is a search, from the town hall or on site, instead of several binders. Plot expiries are visible at a glance. Data can be exported at any time, including in the free version.
Technologies
PHP 8 and MySQL, dependency-free SVG web interface, offline mode, IGN aerial imagery.