Thursday, 23 June 2011

Driving Government Efficiency with Improved Location-based Data

Posted - Matt Beare: For those who may have recently read John Hartshorn’s Blog, will know that I will be in Edinburgh at the end of the month, looking forward to participating in and learning from this year’s INSPIRE Conference. For my part, I will be presenting (Thu 30 Jun @ 16:00) on my experiences of how and where INSPIRE can help drive government efficiency through the improved use of location-based data. These efficiencies will enable public sector organisations to readily share good information, make better decisions, plan more effectively and ultimately deliver better services, to us, the citizen.

I will have this in poster form too, but with a bit of a twist to your typical poster, so why not come along to the welcome drinks and poster session to find out just what that entails (Tue 28 Jun @ 18:00).
I’ll be drawing on experiences from two recent projects to illustrate my point. The first has provided me with the perfect opportunity over the past two and a half years to really understand what INSPIRE is all about and what is required to make it happen. This is the ESDIN project (European Spatial Data Infrastructure with a best practice Network), where 1Spatial worked as part of a large consortium of National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies, researchers, consultants and technology providers, smartly led by EuroGeographics.  My specific focus was to assist in activities around data quality, edge matching, schema transformation and generalization. Therefore, I was delighted to read the comments from the Commission’s final review report on ESDIN, which included:

“The project offers valuable … applications for generalization and schema transformation and, most importantly, effective data quality measures together with tools for testing the conformity to the INSPIRE technical requirements and to the ESDIN specifications. This will gradually allow NMCAs to be able to provide stable geodata and differential updates with a clear identification of the modified features.”

 “ESDIN is one of the first projects that also provide appropriate testing tools that can check the conformity to the ESDIN data specifications as well as conformity to INSPIRE. These results should be forwarded to the INSPIRE community.”





The second project and the main focus of my presentation is one undertaken by 1Spatial last year with Staffordshire County Council (SCC). Seeking to create a safer environment for vulnerable adults, SCC and the local Fire Authority wanted to perform free safety inspections to assess the risk and take remedial action where necessary. But without the appropriate spatial data to support the activity the objective looked unachievable.

They turned to us to help validate and cleanse their client information database and geo-code the data to enable its use in GIS applications to assist in locating the vulnerable and planning visits. Utilising available authoritative address information the project has proven to be a great success, minimising costs within SCC, enabling the Fire Authority to perform the inspections and consequently the exercise has saved lives
! What better incentive to effectively share good quality location-based data do you need than that – invaluable. 

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