Notification for Edit Service (NES)

The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE)  Victoria ‘Notification for Edit Service’, NES (built by Geomatic Technologies) is a web mapping service (using Microsoft VE+).  It was based on the concept of ‘crowd sourcing’ or ‘micro-tasking’ map error notifications with a maintenance process. NES  bypasses some of the old manual paperwork that was involved in change-requests, replacing it with a simple, transparent online process for maintaining some of Victoria’s framework data in Vicmap. This includes road centre-lines, locality boundaries and addresses in Vicmap, the same map data used by firefighters, police, ambulance drivers or the operators of Victoria’s 000 emergency call centres.

The emergency services can use NES to log an issue. The notification (usually to the Council as the responsible authority for addressing and road naming)  might involve an unnamed street  in a private development, incorrectly named streets, a small bridge that has been washed away or rendered unsafe, a country road in a remote area which, while it appears to be a road on aerial imagery, is not a road at all but simply a well-worn animal track and not accessible by vehicles. Each of these notifications,  drawn or annotated on a map view in NES, is assigned a unique tracking number and all of the information  then becomes instantly visible in the NES viewer within the relevant Council.

Although there is no legislation in Victoria to enforce the renaming or addressing to the Australian/New Zealand Standard, this NES record at least serves as an auditable, formal notification to the council from emergency services, for whom inaccurate data can often mean the difference between life and death. The emergency service will ask the council, as the addressing authority, to investigate and rectify the problem.  There is no legislation in Victoria to enforce the renaming or addressing to the Australian/New Zealand Standard. However, the majority of councils, once made aware of the problem, will quickly investigate the situation and make a determined effort to mitigate any risk to public safety.

 

 

You can find more information on this service at the Notification for Editing Service (NES) homepage. It doesnt look like much, as it is the login page, but if you select the ‘help’ button at the top right there is access to a repository of supporting  documentation.