High quality addressing is a critical need for local authorities, transport, utilities, emergency services and other applications that depend upon finding locations. This information is integrated into workflows and business processes, adding considerable valuable to almost all other data holdings. Aligned Assets is a UK-based company that has been involved in gazetteer management system development. Vector1 Media editor Jeff Thurston interviews Carl Hancock of Aligned Assets about recent activities in addressing.
Vector1 Media: Can you briefly describe how your company began and the main focus of the company?
CH: Aligned Assets were started in 1996, originally as GIS developers. Early work saw contracts from the BBC, Experian and Orange, but the company focus changed when contracted by MapInfo to create for them what was called the BS7666 Toolbox. This was the very first gazetteer management system built by the company and was designed to assist Local Authorities in the development of the NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer).
Since then we have focused almost entirely on gazetteer management solutions, continuing to provide software for local authorities to build and maintain their gazetteers. As councils began to see the value in these gazetteers, in collaboration with our customers, we started to look at new ways for them to utilize their data – matching and geocoding to other datasets, setting up links so that other systems could automatically receive updates and web services to give full corporate access.
With the quality of the NLPG increasing, so did the interest from the emergency services who saw it as a high quality source of address data to be use in both frontline and back office systems. Starting with the British Transport Police, who are responsible for security across Great Britain’s rail network, we began a relationship with the UK’s emergency services that has culminated in the development of our Symphony Bluelight suite of emergency service-specific gazetteer software solutions.
Most recently, in addition to our work with local government and the emergency services, we have begun to expand into the private sector, offering to them the same quality and cost-saving software that the public sector has been enjoying for several years.
Vector1 Media: Symphony Bluelight is your latest product release. What problem does it solve and where can it be applied?
CH: Symphony Bluelight is not just one product, but rather a suite of products all designed to provide gazetteer solutions for the emergency services. At the core is the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer, which is our gazetteer management system specifically designed to solve the single biggest gazetteer problem that the emergency services have – no single source of address/location data is completely sufficient for their needs.
It enables any emergency service to take a central source of gazetteer data, currently the NLPG, but shortly the National Address Gazetteer (NAG), and build both onto it and into it additional data in order to create a full, complete, corporate gazetteer.
What are called local records can be added that wouldn’t necessary be created by local government, such as caves and ponds, motorway marker posts, or even manhole covers, which are essential for police when needing to secure locations through checking for explosive devices.
As well as the additional local records, the Bluelight Gazetteer enables the creation of extra fields so that each record can be added to. We’ve made it so that it’s completely flexible, which means there’s no limit to the number of fields or the data that can be recorded. Some of the examples of it in use are the fire service adding a field to indicate if a property has a thatched roof, the police force adding a field to indicate that a firearms license is registered to the property, or the ambulance service adding a field to show door entry codes.
This combination of local records and what we call ‘Xtended Data’, means that with the Bluelight Gazetteer, all addresses and all information pertaining to those addresses can be managed centrally. It can then be supplemented by additional modules that are expressly designed to ensure that whoever needs this information will have it.
Vector1 Media: The NLPG and BS7666 in the UK has received quite a bit of attention in the UK in recent times. How is Aligned Assets involved in that kind of work?
CH: We’ve been involved with the NLPG pretty much since its inception, although you’re right to say that it is only in more recent times that it has become properly noticed. Since most of the data created by local authorities was created from older data, or didn’t exist at all, for a long period, the NLPG was not considered as accurate or complete as other datasets. We worked with those local authorities to provide the tools that would allow them to increase this accuracy, though software is can only ever be a facilitator and ultimately, it was their hard work that truly made the difference.
Although the NLPG itself was not greatly accepted at first, BS7666, which is the British Standard that lays out the ‘rules’ for holding details on every property and street, was widely acknowledged to be a breakthrough in addressing standards. To be ‘BS7666-compliant’ has very much become the benchmark and the development of the National Address Gazetteer, the successor to the NLPG, which will see the whole of the public sector using this same address data, will only further its use and ultimate appeal.
Vector1 Media: What is the relationship of Geoplace UK to your company in terms of addressing related efforts?
CH: We work very closely with GeoPlace in a number of fields. As suppliers of gazetteer management systems, GeoPlace engage with us, as they do other suppliers, on issues surrounding address standards – after all, we’re the ones that need to make our systems compatible with any changes that are brought in.
In my role as Business Communications Manager, my primary work with GeoPlace is about the promotion of the NLPG and the National Address Gazetteer, since after all, only if an organisation buys into the data, can we look to provide a compatible solution. In all my conversations over the past three and a half years I’ve been with Aligned Assets, I’ve always endeavored to promote the NLPG, confident that if an organisation recognizes its value, then we can provide the best software to utilize it.
This will continue with the National Address Gazetteer, which will see for us new markets opening up, who to date, have been using other sources of address data. Whether it’s the National Health Service, Central Government Departments or the private sector, it’s in our interest, and GeoPlace’s interest, that they buy into it. GeoPlace will provide the UK’s best data, and we the best software!
Vector1 Media: Some of our readers outside the UK may not know about BS7666 gazetteer. Can you explain in more detail what it is and an example where it is being used? Is it fair to say that it is the definitive gazetteer in the UK?
CH: Any gazetteer that conforms to the BS7666 standard would be considered a BS7666 gazetteer and mostly these will be found in local government and in those organizations, such as the emergency services, which use the NLPG. The thing to remember about BS7666 gazetteers, which sets them apart from any other, is the relational elements that exist between properties. Rather than a flat file of properties, in BS7666 you not only have a defined link between properties and streets, but also between parent, child and grandchild properties e.g. one record denotes an apartment complex, child records off that denote each apartment block, and then grandchild records off that for each apartment.
As for whether BS7666 gazetteers are the most definitive in the UK, that really depends on what you mean by definitive. When it comes to level of detail, BS7666 gazetteers are undoubtedly the most definitive and no other source of address data can even come close to matching it. However, in terms of usage, the Postal Address File (PAF) from the Royal Mail remains by far the most widely used. Many organizations, especially those in the private sector require little more than the ability to search on a house number and postcode, which is available in any BS7666 gazetteer, but a lot cheaper by using the less feature-rich PAF.
This may change in the future with the release of the National Address Gazetteer, which will conform to BS7666, and will see the whole of Great Britain’s public sector using it. The benefits to be gained from data sharing are more easily realized with the standardized addressing that is available with BS7666 and it’s my hope that that this data sharing agenda will spread into the private sector and BS7666 will become the norm.
Vector1 Media: What do you see as the challenges related to addressing and gazetteers in the UK? Are there initiatives that you are involved in to remedy them in the future?
CH: The biggest challenge I’ve come across is the belief that one size does not fit all, which has contributed significantly to the apprehension about the NLPG from numerous organizations. The needs of local government differs to that of the emergency services, which in turn differs from the private sector and although the NLPG was an improvement on that which had gone before, there was a misconception that it was intended as a replacement to all other sources of addresses.
Local government didn’t have too much of a problem since it were they creating the data, so quite obviously, the data they created was ideally suited for their requirements. As I mentioned early though, the emergency services have always had a much broader requirement in terms of addressing, so often gave the NLPG a width berth, opting instead to retain multiple, often in house, address databases that would provide everything they required. The problem with this though was that the different sources would not be aligned, leading to duplications and inaccuracies, not to mention the time and cost that stems from the management of multiple datasets.
In understanding of this, the solution we provide to the emergency services with Symphony Bluelight is very much the ability to have the ‘best of both worlds’. The core address data, which will supply 90-95% of their operational needs can be sourced from the NLPG and updated on daily basis. All other data can be built into their gazetteer as local records, in the BS7666 format, which means they can get as near to 100% coverage as is humanly possible and have these records used in all frontline and back office systems.
Vector1 Media: Is Aligned Assets involved in the upcoming Olympics? Could you explain how?
CH: Aside from cheering on the British Team, our involvement in the Olympics is very much the same as any other supplier of gazetteer systems – we provide the software that facilitates the hard work of the public sector.
On the one hand you have those in local government, particularly those in the London Boroughs who have had the responsibility of ensuring that all new Olympics developments have been processed efficiently (£5.3 billion of Olympic venues and infrastructure), and on the other you have organisations such as the British Transport Police, Metropolitan Police and Transport for London, whose job it is to ensure the safety and smooth running of the event.
In the case of the British Transport Police, they are looking at a potential capacity (as stated to the International Olympic Committee) of 240,000 people being transported to the Olympic Park every hour, which is the equivalent of trains arriving from 309 stations across the UK every 13.87 seconds. Aiding in this operation is our Symphony SinglePoint software that gives them sub-second searching on all 32 million records of the NLPG, as well as simultaneous searching on their own internal, transport-specific gazetteer and the electoral register, which contains the names of all those registered to vote in the UK.
This gives them the ability to identify with pinpoint accuracy the location of any incidents that occur, whilst the software enables a search on the names data and will instantly cross reference the information with that in the NLPG, thereby providing location coordinates just from a name.
Tenacity, dedication and hard work will be what makes the operations of the British Transport Police a success during the Olympics, but it is nice to know that we too are playing our part.
Vector1 Media: Can you explain why good street addressing matters and how it can make a real difference for businesses considering to use your products?
CH: Why does addressing matter? A good question and one with so many answers. I suppose the most important reason is that every person and every business has an address, so if you have a need to communicate with those people, to understand them better, or in the case of the emergency services to be able to locate them quickly, that is when addressing matters.
One of the mantras that we find ourselves saying is that it’s not having the data that’s important, but rather how it is used and it’s in this regard that our products come into their own. There are clear inefficiencies CH:to any company if services are being replicated, which is why, in the case of businesses, we lean toward a model whereby they have one source of address data, with all systems accessing this source.
In the case of a large utility company for example, their need for accurate addressing is significant and its use will occur throughout the organisation. There will be the requirement for sending out bills, for getting engineers out to fix faults and getting people out to read meters, all the while ensuring that an audit trail is recorded correctly against each property. As calls come into their customer service, it is essential that whatever action is required is efficiently dealt with and ensuring that each department is referencing the same property is one key method of making this happen.
Only recently I got a letter through from my electricity supplier to say that they were sad to see me leave them, yet I’d not changed supplier. As it turned out, the family in the flat above me had opted to change, but due to bad addressing, my account had been closed rather than theirs, purely because our addresses our similar. With good addressing, this would never have happened.
Staying with the utilities theme, one thing that is often heard is how difficult it is for people when they move into newly built properties to get their broadband connected or set up a gas supply and this is because those companies aren’t aware that the property exists. Because the NLPG is derived from local authority data, through whom all new properties have to pass, any company that uses the NLPG will know of the properties existence quite literally as the final brick is being laid. This is what we can offer, as opposed to the current scenario where that information might not be available for three months, if not longer.
Vector1 Media: Aligned Assets has recently moved to a Software-by-Subscription model. How is that going and what has been the customer response?
CH: The response has been fantastic. We had come up with the concept of Software by Subscription in 2009 as we were looking for ways to offer a method of procurement that was more flexible, but as the cuts to public sector spending started to hit in the UK, the cost savings really came to the fore as the major benefit.
Too often we were finding that people were interested in upgrading from their existing products and moving across to our solutions, but the associated costs of change were prohibitive. With Software by Subscription, we’ve been able to reduce the upfront costs by over 50%, which means that people can look at a year-on-year cost comparison that is a lot more compatible with today’s economic climate.
What we’ve always tried to do is reflect customer needs and offer options that are conducive to their way of working and with Software-by-Subscription we seem to have achieved that.
————————————————————————————-
Aligned Assets are an industry leader in gazetteer and address management solutions. They supply software to over 100 Local Authorities, Fire & Rescue Services, Police Forces and National Parks. They are the UK’s first reseller of the NLPG, providing superior address management across the private and public sectors. In addition to software and data solutions they can offer a complete range of consultancy, training, bespoke development and project management.
