The candidate process, which will see the emergency services of England and Wales able to send updates for inclusion in the Country’s most definitive address database, the NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer), is set to be taken to the next level by gazetteer specialists Aligned Assets. Symphony Bluelight, the gazetteer management system that is already in use across the emergency services, will contain advanced functionality that is not available from any other supplier and with it the options that will prove essential to the day-to-day operations of the emergency services.
The procedure that other gazetteer management systems on the market will use involves the emergency service identifying an inaccuracy in the NLPG, at which point that inaccuracy will be sent to the National Hub as a candidate record. At that stage it will be checked before being sent to the local custodian, who will do further checks and then either accept or reject the change. It will then be returned to the Hub and made available to the emergency services the next time they take a download of the NLPG.
This entire process can take up to twelve days, during which time the emergency service has to wait for that inaccuracy to be corrected. In Symphony Bluelight, at the same time that the inaccuracy is identified and the candidate record is created, the emergency service can override the NLPG record so that the inaccuracy is instantly corrected. The process of updating the NLPG will still proceed through the National Hub and the local Custodian, but those using Symphony Bluelight will no longer have to wait.
Once the candidate record has been formally processed, Symphony Bluelight will show which records have been accepted and which rejected giving the emergency service the option of accepting the change, or if the candidate was rejected by the Custodian, the override can be kept in place.
Speaking about the candidate process, managing director Dinesh Thanigasalam said, “By giving the emergency services the ability to forward address inaccuracies, it is providing another set of eyes and ears on the ground, which will help every user of the NLPG and when released, the National Address Gazetteer.”
“As Symphony Bluelight was designed and built specifically for the emergency services, in consultation with them, we made the decision that the current process was just too slow for their needs. No one would deny that change intelligence needs to be properly validated, but we were told that if an inaccuracy was identified, it needed instant remedying, so this is what Symphony Bluelight does.”
