JOSE DIACONO

As a rule, 75 per cent of the cost of a spatial system is in the data. Inevitably, some of this data will change or be wrong, so there are huge benefits to be gained by putting the people who find the problems in touch with those who fix them.
 
At the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) conference last year, Bruce Thompson, the director of spatial information infrastructure in Victoria’s Department of Sustainability and Environment announced a new system to do just this.
 
He pointed out that it is the government’s job to ensure that fundamental data is of the highest quality. In Victoria, such data is collected into the Corporate Spatial Data Library. While this is constantly improving, he said, people’s expectations are increasing many times faster. The library holds more than 400 datasets, including VicMap products such as Property, Addressing and Transport.
 
These datasets receive a million edits per annum. Some 75,000 new properties are added each year and 2.8 million addresses linked to an access point for emergency services. Every road in the state is in the Ambulance Victoria rural dispatch system and in the statewide Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority emergency dispatch system. Last year, these systems handled more than two million calls.
 
Victoria’s 79 councils are responsible for generating this data. Emergency services and utilities employees use it every day. When they find errors or gaps, the question is: who do we tell?
 
Given that reporting data errors isn’t their main job, it is important that the mechanisms for communicating errors and finding out what is being done about them are both easy-to-use and effective.
 
The Victorian government launched the first version of the Notification and Editing System in July 2008. NES 1.0 serves up a view of the most current version of VicMap. For the first time, users can work from an identical map base using no more than a standard web browser.
 
The objective is to make it easy and worthwhile for users to flag a problem to the data custodian, and to shorten the approval and update cycle. In NES 1.0, users and custodians notify and approve changes, which are still outsourced. In NES 2.0, custodians will be able to directly modify the data.
 
‘I have been very impressed with the new process. I have lodged 175 faults since the system went live; 69 have been accepted in under a month, and some in less than a week,’ says Andrew Wise, a GIS specialist with ESTA.
 
The authority runs Victoria’s computer aided dispatch system for fire, police and ambulance services.
 
‘NES provides a transparent view of the process so it easy to see the status of each change request. It opens up communication between notifiers, councils, the registrar of geographic names and VicMap custodians,’ says Wise.
 
‘Previously, the only way we could report faults was via email to the product custodians, and it could take six months for the change to be implemented in VicMap. During that time, we wouldn’t receive any notification of the status of the fault.’
 
Notifiers and custodians use a browser. There are no plug-ins to install or licences to purchase. The user submits changes to text – such as a property identifier – using forms or attachments. Graphic changes require the Easy Editor. GIS independence has helped make NES acceptable to any GIS software. It also means that no proprietary schema modifications to the database were required.
 
The project has a compressed history. The contract was awarded to Geomatic Technologies in February 2008. The first release was in July. With such a tight timescale, proven technologies became essential. ESpatial’s iSmart is used for the graphical updates and Oracle Workspace Manager supports the data versioning requirements. 1Spatial’s Radius Studio provides rules-based consistency checking in Oracle.
 
For long-term flexibility, the Department required simple tools so staff could build in business rules and data-driven workflows. This routes the change requests directly to the appropriate custodian or maintainer, rather than relying on embedded rules in software. NES has delivered this requirement, which has enabled a focus on the business processes rather than the spatial technologies.
 
ESTA strategic data development manager Yvonne Thompson says the most important question call-takers ask is: ‘Where is your emergency?’ Usually the answer is straightforward, but it may not be. The caller may be mistaken; the street may have ambiguous names or a street sign may be wrong. The centre line may be wrongly located or the road may have been named by a developer and somehow bypassed the gazettal process.
 
The type of error dictates where the request for a change is sent. In all instances, the audit trail is clear enough to identify systemic problems – such as one type of problem repeatedly occurring in a particular geographic area – and fix them once and for all.
 
The value of NES is being enhanced by the Registrar of Geographic Names. Modifications to the basic system will allow a user to initiate an official street naming process. All name changes must be referred to emergency services for approval, because duplicates within a certain radius, overcomplicated names or unusual spelling can make them hard to identify.
 
Currently such requests come to the authority as a pdf map extracted from the local government association’s own GIS. This may well differ from the latest VicMap. The enhancements to NES will provide mandatory fields, built-in referral to custodians, and the shared ability to add remarks and redline the map. All of these will significantly reduce the QA workload, provide visibility to all parties and provide end-to-end tracking of the change – from initiation to the release of the new data in VicMap.
 
For Diane Daniell of Central Goldfields Shire Council, the reporting is the most valuable aspect of NES. She sees it from both sides, being a notifier and a custodian. ‘Notifications don’t disappear into a black hole,’ she says.
 
She uses the NES Dashboard to report on the progress of changes that cross her desk. There may be a good reason for delays, plus it adds more accountability. She uses NES to submit address and property changes. Corrections to a physical boundary or a titling anomaly go to the Land Registry. Making it easier to submit changes will mean an influx of work, but she says this will be a one-off effort that leads to improved quality. It also eliminates the conflicts that can arise when state and local government’s work from inconsistent data.
 
At present, she uses the Easy Editor ‘scratchpad’ to identify errors such as incorrect property boundaries. Her change requests are sent to the department and the maintainers, Logica and SKM.
 
In version 2, the Advanced Editor will allow her, as the custodian, to make updates directly into VicMap Property through a secure web-based mapping interface. This will be supported by more complex technology such as Radius Studio, which will, for example, prevent the user moving an address point outside a property boundary.
 
The Advanced Editor will enable custodians to carry out controlled edits – including name changes – split areas and create or move address points. This will deliver updates to end users in even shorter timeframes.
 
Daniell would like to see NES used by a number of custodians to create combined datasets. For example, the Municipal Association of Victoria wants a dataset with the location of all council offices in the state. Using the system, each council could maintain the position of its own office. This will require more advanced user authentication, but is typical of applications driven by user demand.
 
Rather than maintaining some datasets in-house – such as garbage collection areas – it may be possible for councils to use the Advanced Editor to maintain them directly in the Corporate Spatial Data Library. This would be especially useful for smaller councils with few internal GIS resources.
 
She says the department’s approach of introducing NES gradually – by first training ‘responsible notifiers’ in the CFA, then allowing more and more people into the system – is a good one.
 
In the long run, the system could handle 600 datasets from 200 custodians. There are potentially thousands of notifiers, including Ambulance Victoria, Barwon Water, Melbourne Water and Telstra. The longterm efficiency gains will be enormous.
 
But as demand increases, it may raise issues of system performance. John Gallagher, the manager of data acquisition and management at DSE, says he is making sure he gets the fundamentals right first. ‘Efficiencies and goodwill go out of the window if users are sitting and waiting for the system to respond. Consistent performance is an issue.’
 
Ben Wallis of Yarra Ranges Shire thinks the system was initially a victim of its own success. Stronger than expected take-up in the first couple of months led to a backlog of change requests, although that has now improved, he says. He praises system administrator Mark O’Brien’s prompt response to problems
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Yvonne Thompson also shared this initial frustration but adds: ‘It is a huge demonstration of the value of NES that users have persisted despite this.’
 
Gallagher presented overall statistics for the system to Victorian spatial users at the March NewTech conference. He told the meeting that the maintainers have processed 2212 change requests, with an average turnaround of seven days. The custodian declined some 393, while 580 were with Land Registry and 384 with local government. Such powerful reporting means appropriate budgets and resources can be put in place – both by the Department and custodians – to handle current and expected volumes.
 
Gallagher has engaged consultants to validate database tuning practices and hardware configuration settings. This will ensure the system performs a peak efficiency and scale with expected demand.
 
His team will complete a technical review of the software and the way it is connected around the core workflow engine.
 
He notes two important organisational learnings so far: ‘Spend a good amount of time planning and communicating the specifications of the service to prospective builders,’ he says, ‘and spend a similar amount of time managing the expectations of the user community.’
 
He says the staged release was well received.

Jose Diacono is a Sydney-based freelance writer and marketing consultant.

Issue 41; June – July 2009