The Tech Blog
Michael Byrne
Geospatial Information Officer (GIO)
12/21/09
Michael Byrne: Today we realized another milestone in geospatial information for California. The California Emergency Management Agency awarded, the Office of the State Chief Information Officer a $1 million dollar grant to develop an enterprise geocoding service. Geocoding is the process by which a standardized location (like a latitude and longitude) is applied to an address. The effort will provide CalEMA and supporting agencies with a single comprehensive service for mapping critical infrastructure and key resources by assigning addresses to a map location. Secondly, this service will map locations required for incident response like command centers, shelters, vulnerable populations and gathering locations.
A service dedicated to emergency response means that every command center will be using the same map base and coordinates for understanding addresses during an emergency. Imagine that we will all have common map understanding of the houses affected by a large fire, the schools that could be closed, the business shut down and the evacuation routes and command centers that need to be set up. Having this service will ensure that disparate command centers will be operating with a common base.
This award does more than emergency response for the state though. By setting up a comprehensive enterprise service, we ensure all state agencies which maintain address data, will be able to use this service. Having these agencies use this single comprehensive service means for the first time there will be a common understanding of mapping addresses in the state. We will ensure that addresses in every state agency are mapped with the same standards and methods providing a common approach and bridging the cap of our state silos.
To illustrate the point of how important geocoding is to state coffers, all one really needs to do is understand the volume of address data maintained in different areas of state government.
- The Franchise Tax board quarterly manages 10s of millions of addresses quarterly for income tax collection
- The Department of Health Care Services manages over $6 million addresses monthly for Medi-Cal beneficiaries
- The Employment Development Department manages millions of addresses monthly unemployment insurance
- The Department of Public Health manages nearly a million addresses annually of birth and death records.
Each of these, and countless other business cases, have a direct financial and human impact to the state. Managing these data as map based data provide the state with an advanced method of delivering service to it residence while providing new opportunities to increase efficiency. Perhaps no other single geospatial effort can compare to a common base of geocoding the states data.
We are excited about this new effort, and look forward to managing the states data better.