In an interview with vice president of Public Safety Products, Intergraph SG&I Kalyn Sims, and Russ Johnson, director of Public Safety for Esri, discussed the latest collaboration between the two companies, to enhance geospatial capabilities for public safety and security agencies. Through the collaboration, the companies will work to more tightly align Intergraph’s Computer-Aided Dispatch system, I/CAD, and Esri’s ArcGIS Platform.
Posts Tagged ‘public safety’
Intergraph and Esri Collaborate to Enhance Geospatial for Public Safety
Thursday, March 26th, 2015The Growing Role of GIS
Thursday, May 2nd, 2013As public safety moves closer to a nationwide Next-Generation 9-1-1 system, Geographic Information Systems will play an ever-increasing part.
By guest writer, Anthony Haddad, Sales Engineer, Intrado
The use of geographic information systems (GIS) is not new to public safety. It first came on the scene as an important tool with the introduction of wireless 9-1-1 service when location information could not be derived from a fixed service address. In today’s legacy architecture, geocoding or plotting X,Y coordinates is often used in conjunction with mapping applications to help dispatch responders to the correct location, but that has been the extent of its application.
Public safety agencies have been collecting GIS information for decades in order to populate the information found in selective routing database (SRDB), automatic location information (ALI) and master street address guides (MSAG). When an emergency call comes into a legacy GIS-equipped PSAP, associated addresses or X,Y coordinates are delivered as well, though the coordinates are meaningless on their own. In order to be valuable, this data must be plotted on a map in either the call-processing or computer-aided dispatch (CAD) environment. Once plotted, the information can be applied to perform dispatch functions. In this way, GIS is a supplemental tool used to verify location alone.