Sniping over $5m database plan

By ADAM GIFFORD

Land Information New Zealand (Linz) wants to spend $5 million building a new database of maps despite former state-owned mapping company Terralink having such a database already in use.

The Linz plans are contained in a request for proposal asking for consultants to develop user requirements and high-level design options for a register of common location data.

Linz maintains some common location data for electoral and other purposes within its Landonline system, including addresses, road centrelines, road names, place names, meshblocks and administration boundaries.

"In practice, this data has been found to be inadequately structured, insufficiently complete, and often lacks the necessary accuracy for their [Government agencies'] business purposes," the request said.

Emergency services use location data supplied by Terralink, which includes data built up by the old Department of Survey and Land Information as well as by New Zealand Aerial Mapping, which bought Terralink from receivers in 2001.

Terralink chief executive Mike Donald said that dataset, which was continually updated from 20 sources including local governments, telcos and emergency services call centres, had 99.6 per cent accuracy.

"If you take address data from the Linz core record system, we rate that at 66 per cent accuracy," Donald said.

"In a huge number of instances, if you sent an armed offenders squad to an address from the Linz system, it would end up at someone else's house."

Donald said Terralink last year told the Government it was willing to offer up its data for national ownership. "We did not detect any willingness on their part to accept it."

He said it would cost more than $5 million to build a similar database.

"The most important part is that once you have built it you need to maintain it, so you need all the systems in place to identify and validate the changes and then deliver the changes to the organisations who use it in a range of formats."

Terralink has 12 staff devoted just to maintaining its common location database.

Donald said Terralink was transferring ownership of its database to two trusts, one which would make it available to emergency services and the other for use by commercial entities.

The stakes are significant. Once a database is accepted as the standard, the commercial value of competing location databases such as that maintained by NZ Post will plummet.

Debbie Ward, the information solutions manager for Linz's national address register, said she was unaware of the Terralink approach.

She said Linz had been working with stakeholders since 2000 to define the standards under the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) for common location data for what is referred to as ESA (Emergency Services and Government Administration).

"This present RFP [request for proposal] is part of that," Ward said.

Apart from the police, Fire Service and Electoral Office, stakeholders include Linz itself, the Representation Commission, transport sector agencies, Statistics, Civil Defence and territorial authorities.

Donald said that over the past 18 months Terralink had incorporated the ESA standard and aspects of Linz's logical model into its integrated database.

"That project is about 97 per cent complete, with another six weeks to run. Then we will have a database which meets the requirements of what Linz is proposing."

He said some things in Linz's logical model for ESA compliance were just not practical, and issues of maintenance and data supply were more complex than they appeared.

"If they could get someone to build a database, if they overcome all the maintenance issues, they are still years away," Donald said.

"We have a practical working model with maintenance and supply systems which can be turned over tomorrow."

Terralink

Land Information New Zealand