Meridian Awards 2010

Problem

Finding and entering hard to describe addresses and locations has caused more problems for Australia's Queensland Police Service (QPS) QPRIME project than any one other area of data management. Queensland addresses and locations tend to be rather convoluted. Locations such as off or on-ramps of a highway can be difficult to describe and match against our location reference records held in our records management system (RMS). To find the location of an incident in the RMS, an officer has to know how the location is described. If the feature does not have a name, or if the name is unknown or unusually described, finding the address in the RMS may be difficult.

Impact of Problem

Difficulty in finding addresses caused frustration for officers and compromised data quality in the RMS due to duplicate and 'forced in' addresses. This in turn:

• Compromised QPS corporate reporting when aggregating reports at different levels of police administration.
• Hampered effective data analysis of intelligence held in the RMS.

These issues increased the workload for QPRIME's Tactical Data Management Group to whom officers report data anomalies. With approximately 10,000 operational officers using QPRIME, incorrect addresses can become a serious drain on resources.

Trying to find and create 'place of interest' locations such as beaches, public toilets, parks greatly reduced the productivity of officers because of the increased time required to enter the incident.

Resolution

Data quality, critical to successful intelligence-led policing, is top priority for QPS. This issue was addressed by QPS in an innovative way using location intelligence.
QPRIME Mapping was developed to help officers visualise and analyse the distribution of addresses, incidents and persons of interest. QPRIME mapping provides bi-directional integration with the RMS so that:

• Selected records in the RMS can be mapped to allow officers to further analyse and identify trends in the data of interest.
• Incidents at selected locations in QPRIME Mapping can be further analysed in the RMS along with additional information held there.

To add a reverse geocoding capability to QPRIME Mapping was a natural extension to improve the integrity of the Service's location data. The solution provides officers with the capability to simply identify the location of an incident, for example traffic accident located on the off ramp of a major highway, by clicking the location on the interactive map on the screen. This simple process selects the corresponding address from the RMS to link the officer's report about the incident. This means the quality and integrity of the address or location of recorded incidents is maintained in a consistent and repeatable way.

Value to the Organisation

QPRIME Mapping and the reverse geocoding capability for recording of incidents are critical to maintaining the quality of our data. In addition, much value is added to the data held in RMS by QPRIME Mapping where the data can be visually located and analysed for additional intelligence.

The impact QPRIME mapping is having on the organisation is best measured by the fact that the site receives almost 30,000 hits per month. The intuitive nature of QPRIME Mapping has allowed us to deliver training via movie CBT to 10,000 officers.

The improved quality of our location records means we can enhance the service's geographic analytical capability by adding hot spotting (ability to identify clusters of activity), repeat locations analysis and the geographical linking of entities, relationships and associations of records in the RMS.