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Ensuring that your location data is up to date, accurate and consistent across your organisation can significantly improve your operations and decision making.
Gazetteers are used across a range of industries to provide place names, coordinates and descriptions that help give a detailed source of location information, often visualised on a map by integrating with GIS mapping software.
In the context of the emergency services, they are critical in helping to quickly identify and locate places, ensuring swift action during incidents, route-planning, mapping out areas to allocate resources efficiently and in the strategic planning of responses to various scenarios that can be tested in training exercises.
While critical to emergency response there are a few challenges that services face in realising the benefits to operations.
- Outdated data can lead to delays or errors in locating incidents so must be regularly updated to ensure the information is accurate.
- The data often requires integrating with other platforms such as command and control and this can be complex where systems are different and requires continuous maintenance.
- Local naming conventions and specific knowledge are layered on top of standard data and may therefore be different across neighbouring services.
- Services often don’t have full access to data outside their operational area thus hindering any cross-border collaboration.
With data available from many sources, private and commercial, it is often the case that there are national agreements in place, such as the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) in the UK, that provides all emergency services access to consolidated data sources. Traditionally this has been built on postal data of commercial and residential properties, but this can be lacking in vital information on, for example, road networks, leading to service having to add their own local knowledge of locations such as junctions or bridges that are vital in being able to coordinate incident response.
To address this, in the UK there are a couple of new developments that aim to fill the gaps in the data.
Firstly, the new Emergency Services Gazetteer, from Ordnance Survey that will provide a national standard for extra location data especially on the road network and, secondly, access to a hosted service, the Emergency Services API from Experian, providing national address and electoral register data.
As more and more data become available from different sources how do services ensure that their systems are kept up to date and that they can use and report on the data efficiently?
Taking a proactive approach to the management of location data may seem like an administrative overhead with dedicated resources reacting to local issues, researching new data and updating data sources. But, in the long-term, this promotes best practice and leads to far fewer problems with data and reduces the impact of errors or missing data on operations.
As an example, it often takes a significant amount of time for the data on new housing developments to make it through to national sources, a crucial time-lag if there are emergency calls in that area. Taking a local approach to collecting that data and uploading it into your local systems reduces this time-lag and also provides a valuable feedback loop to local authorities, often the source of national data, to make sure that they process the updates in as timely a manner as possible.
A gazetteer management platform, such as NEC Compass, provides a single point for integration across a Services operational systems bringing together all the external data sources, ensuring consistency, enabling local knowledge, standardising reporting and efficient management of data updates
To find out more about NEC Compass visit our website here.
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