E911 Geospatial Addressing

A driver, late at night, encounters an animal on Interstate 95. To avoid hitting the animal, the driver swerves and goes through a side barrier and over an embankment. Having sustained significant injuries the driver calls for emergency services using a wireless phone. The driver losses consciousness and is unable to give the location of the accident. Due to injuries sustained, the driver dies because the emergency service personnel could not locate the driver in time.

Imagine the same scenario, but instead, the driver has a handheld GPS E911 enabled wireless phone. Although still unable to give the location before becoming unconscious, the GPS enabled phone continues to transmits the location. Once the GPS coordinates are received it takes a few minutes for the codes to be referenced to a map location. This time delay is due to the time is takes to transmit and process geographic coordinates and relate the coordinates through a geographic information system. However, in this scenario, even though the emergency personnel arrived at the right location, the driver also expires because the time it took to process and reference the location was too long.

Imagine the same scenario, however this time, a single Geocode® code is transmitted and processed immediately. This is possible because no code conversion is required. In this scenario emergency personnel can be dispatched immediately because the location is known in a matter of seconds after transmission receipt. However, because the emergency service personnel did not know they would encounter rough terrain, they  were not equipped to handle an accident that would require emergency lift equipment. This delay in rescue operations resulted in the driver's death. This was due to lack of visual information concerning the accident site.

Imagine the same scenario above. However, this time the emergency personnel also query a video-mapping database where visual media of the terrain is geospatially referenced. This enables near real-time visual terrain verification. This visual media identifies the requirement for special lifting equipment. In this case, the dispatcher sends a second team with equipment within a few minutes. As a result, the second emergency team arrives within minutes of the first emergency team's arrival. The team's prepares for an emergency lifting evacuation immediately and the accident victim is saved.

In the above scenarios two critical factors are time and visual information. The time it takes to process geographic information and the visual depiction of the crash area are critical factors.

GFI's Geocode® increases the productivity in geospatial analysis, reduces the data overhead for transmission of geospatial information over telecommunication networks, enables the representation of a pinpoint location down to within 3 cm horizontally and 1 meter vertically, and enables better information security by eliminating the use of alpha text characters necessary for most decryption techniques.