Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer Released for the Fire and Rescue Service

SURREY, ENGLAND, March 16, 2011 (Press-News.org) With the cancellation of the FiReControl Project, gazetteer specialists Aligned Assets are pleased to announce the release of the UK's first corporate gazetteer designed specifically for the Fire and Rescue Service.

With over two years of research and development, the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer can provide unmatched levels of functionality that enable the fire and rescue services to create and maintain gazetteer data to feed all frontline and back office systems.

Currently fully compatible with the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer will also be fully compatibility with the forthcoming National Address Gazetteer (NAG) that will for the first time see all emergency services using the same source of address data.

The Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer will provide the opportunity for fire and rescue services to create an unlimited amount of additional fields to be stored against each NLPG/NAG record such as properties with thatched roofs, flood plain designations, colloquial property names or black powder storage. Unique to it is the fact that if the NLPG/NAG record is changed, or even deleted, the additional information is retained. This functionality is further enhanced by introducing the ability to store multiple free text notes against a property.

Speaking about the creation of candidate records that will allow the fire and rescue service to initiate changes in the NLPG/NAG, managing director of Aligned Assets, Dinesh Thanigasalam expanded on the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer's functionality.

"Currently, when the fire and rescue service discover an error in the NLPG/NAG, the systems in place allow for the national hub to be notified, who in turn notify the relevant local authority, who then ultimately decide if the change should be made. Assuming that they accept the change, it has to be returned to the national hub and then be downloaded by the fire and rescue service. In total the process can take up to two weeks."

"In a situation when the inaccuracy of an address can cost lives, in consultation with the fire and rescue service, we decided to build in the option to override an NLPG/NAG record instantaneously so that as soon as an error in address data is discovered, it can be immediately rectified. The candidate process will proceed as normal, but the fire and rescue service will no longer have to wait."

Dinesh Thanigasalam went onto expand on the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer's ability to hold the entire NLPG/NAG database. "Most fire and rescue services will want to hold address data that sits outside of their area because, at the end of the day, their responsibility doesn't stop simply because someone is on the other side of a boundary."

"This requirement for 'out of area' data varies tremendously, so what we have created with the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer is the ability to handle the entire country's address data. This means that a fire and rescue service has the ability to manage one million records or thirty million with the same simple, ease of use."

Because the FiReControl project was to see regionalisation of control rooms, with the data management retained on a local level, Symphony Bluelight has been designed to operate under shared services whereby a single gazetteer database from one or more fire and rescue services can be managed separately by the individual services, with read rights accessible to all, yet change rights accessible only within a service's area.

On this, Dinesh Thanigasalam was quoted as saying, "The merging of control rooms is still a hot topic in the fire and rescue service, yet even during the FiReControl Project it was acknowledged that regional control rooms had to be supplied with locally sourced data that utilised local knowledge."

"For this reason, irrespective of whether modernisation of mobilising systems is performed by individual brigades or as a shared service, the management and maintenance of gazetteer data should still be performed locally, which is exactly why the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer is equally adept at gazetteer management for one individual brigade or for several working together in collaboration."

Aligned Assets have ensured that the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer addresses other key areas vital to Fire Services not usually catered for by other NLPG compliant Gazetteers. These include the ability to maintain abbreviations for addresses and ensure any searching on the Gazetteer takes the abbreviations into account. The searching capability is also further extended by having an option to use fuzzy searching which helps minimise the effect of spelling mistakes when carrying out a search.

To find out more about the Symphony Bluelight Gazetteer visit: http://www.aligned-assets.co.uk/bluelight

ABOUT ALIGNED ASSETS
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 commercial and public sectors. In addition to software and data solutions they can offer a complete range of consultancy, training, bespoke development and project management.