2012.07.18 - Meeting with Police Department

Attendees

Sharon Tseng (police)
Mauricio Monsalve (police)
Jeff Johnson (Dept of Technology (DT))
Paul McCullough (DT)

Subject

In this meeting we discussed high level requirements that the Police Department has for validating and enriching street address information in their Incident Reporting System.

Discussion

The police dept is building out their Incident Reporting System (IRS) and are looking to solve a street address validation and enrichment problem.

The validation breaks down into several services:

• street name validation
• street suffix validation
• street number validation
• intersection with

Enrichment includes:

• geocoding the street address

We also discussed the need for looking up the police "plot" and district for a known XY but agreed this to be out of scope for now.

This will be happening real time from a Web application.
The application is being written by contractors and staff in Oracle Apex.
This seems like a good candidate for Web services.

We can add these services to the Enterprise Addressing System (EAS - see http://eas.sfgov.org/).
We discussed the options of using JSON or XML.
Alternatives to EAS include talking to the Dept Public Works - I mentioned Eddie Ching.
The police dept can also provide its own validation service but then would have to write and maintain street data ETLs from DPW.

One of the issues we discussed is Service Level Agreement (SLA).
DT has a "business hours" SLA with Dept of Building Inspection (DBI) for EAS.
IRS would require a 24x7 SLA.

Should you decide to go with EAS, much of the work is settling on the message content.
For an example discussion, see this page: Address Change Publisher

Next Steps

Paul will be available for more extensive work early to mid-august.
If you need something to tinker with before then, I can build a simple street name auto-complete service in an hour or so in a QA env.