Enhancing the Arizona Address Data Management Ecosystem: Midyear Meeting Presentation Highlight

As one of the two original pilot states for the National Address Database (NAD) project, Arizona continues to build a statewide address management ecosystem. Key success factors include support of the Arizona Geographic Information Council (AGIC) and the Arizona State Land Department (ASLD), active state and local government collaboration, strategic public and private partnerships, participation in NSGIC's Address & Transportation Committee’s identification of national guidelines and best practices, and the adoption of new technology to improve data workflows and validate authoritative addresses.  

The presenters will provide a brief overview of the Arizona Address Management Ecosystem and discuss several of its key components:

Data governance and project support in a changing state environment;
The ASLD is established in statute as the Arizona Land Resource Information System (ALRIS), and the ASLD Land Commissioner is also established as the Arizona’s State Cartographer. The Commissioner may appoint staff to act on his or her behalf as the State Cartographer. Historically, the State Cartographer has fulfilled the role of Arizona’s GIS coordination, advocated for state-wide GIS initiatives, and served as the NSGIC Arizona State Representative.

The current Arizona Governor has promoted an initiative for all state-run agencies to assess and improve their business practices to increase efficiencies, streamline government activities and maximize benefits to the public.

In response to the governor’s initiative, ASLD has continued to assess and improve its core business functions, one of which is the State Cartographer’s Office. The result is enterprise GIS coordination, involving key ASLD GIS staff, rather than assigning the responsibility of state-wide GIS coordination only to the State Cartographer’s Office. While organizational changes at ASLD were implemented, the agency continues its strong support of Arizona’s GIS activities and coordination through its support of the AGIC.

State-wide GIS initiatives such as participation in the development of the NAD, Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1), and the All Road Network of Linear Referenced Data (ARNOLD) are examples of high priority projects that exemplify the mission of AGIC, and by extension ASLD. These projects ultimately benefit both the Arizona and national GIS community while also improving the safety of the public.

Terra Systems Southwest, GIStic and GISWorks were brought on as technical consultants to support the collaborative efforts of ALSD, Arizona Department of Administration’s 9-1-1 Office, and the Arizona Department of Transportation. This collaboration helps manage and validate Arizona address and roads data. It also assists the state in improving data workflows which support the ongoing development of NAD, NG9-1-1 and ARNOLD.   

The Emergency Address Portal is a web mapping application providing non-technical GIS users the ability to correct errors found in GIS address point data and communicate those changes directly to the data provider. Features include zooming to addresses and landmarks; adding, deleting, moving and editing address attributes; sharing live screen views with others and much more. EMAP is built using a NENA Next Generation 9-1-1 standard data schema and hosted on a robust SQL Server database with tracking and roll-back capability. This tool helps fill a niche in the address ecosystem for public safety professionals to collaborate and give feedback to the GIS back end professionals.

Address Analyzer with Artificial Intelligence is an on-line address parsing program designed to clean addresses coming from various State customer databases with the goal of creating one clean, standardized address from one to many “dirty” versions provided by customers. It is built on open source Python AI libraries and is hosted on a sophisticated data schema in PostGres SQL.

Data Uploader is in the conceptual design phase. It will be a web service that automates the process of local data collection, inventory, assessment and feedback about data submitted to the State GIS portal by the sixteen 9-1-1 System in Arizona. Data Upload will replace or supplement the scores of current procedures and ArcGIS scripting tools used in the current process.

Presenters will briefly demonstrate the key features of automated tools that are enhancing the quality address pipeline and feed-back loop between local and state agencies in Arizona.