The TN NG911 server got an upgrade this month with some quality assurance checks. After working with Henry County for the last bit we’re into more “what if” scenarios.
- What if we ran checks for misspelled addresses or improperly labeled addresses?
- What if we started filling out the fields we weren’t filling with out with our ArcGIS/Geodatabase setup?
Working with Chad Howard (911 GIS Guru for Henry County TN) we’ve started playing with data problems. One thing I learned is that the amount of quality assurance checks at the county level are lacking – not because anyone didn’t want to do it it’s just hard working with a basic arcgis license to do anything significant. That’s where postgis comes into play. I’ve got a total of three checks on the addresses planned with two implemented as of right now.
What if you accidentally add two address points with the same geometry? A red circle appears in one of the layers in your database (and in your QGIS session) alerting you to the mistake. What if you accidentally misspell an address street name and that doesn’t match a street? A blue circle appears. If you look at the example it looks like someone can’t spell. Actually the old setup was adding spaces to names. So instead of “Main” you had “Main “. That’s an easy enough fix we can do in a bulk edit.
I expect these next set of checks to slowly become irrelevant over the next bit as the client takes full advantage of QGIS’s forms for data entry. Once again we’re hitting spaces as opposed to nulls in the data in 80% of the cases. We should only have 4 pre-directionals – well at most 8 – but for this county they only have 4.
We can bulk edit the spaces away in the database. It’s nice to have this table sitting in the qaqc schema just to check occasionally but I do expect that to drift off in significance the more we use Fulcrum and QGIS’s Forms for data input. These checks check everything from street types, names, to directionals. Like I said – over time these start drifting off in significance but it’s nice for now.
Anyway – more quality checks are planned but we’re over he first hurdle to making this even more useful and easy.
