Abstract
Abstract. Currently, addressing practices in Greenland do not support geocoding. Addressing points on a map by geographic coordinates is vital for emergency services such as police and ambulance for avoiding ambiguities in finding incident locations (Government of Greenland, 2010) Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the current addressing practices in Greenland. Asiaq (Asiaq, 2011) is a public enterprise of the Government of Greenland which holds three separate databases regards addressing and place references: – list of locality names (towns, villages, farms), – technical base maps (including road center lines not connected with names, and buildings), – the NIN registry (The Land Use Register of Greenland - holds information on the land allotments and buildings in Greenland). The main problem is that these data sets are not interconnected, thus making it impossible to address a point in a map with geographic coordinates in a standardized way. The possible solutions suffer from the fact that Greenland has a scattered habitation pattern and the generalization of the address assignment schema is a difficult task. A schema would be developed according to the characteristics of the settlement pattern, e.g. cities, remote locations and place names. The aim is to propose an ontology for a common postal address system for Greenland. The main part of the research is dedicated to the current system and user requirement engineering. This allowed us to design a conceptual database model which corresponds to the user requirements, and implement a small scale prototype. Furthermore, our research includes resemblance findings in Danish and Greenland's addressing practices, data dictionary for establishing Greenland addressing system's logical model and enhanced entity relationship diagram. This initial prototype of the Greenland addressing system could be used to evaluate and build the full architecture of the addressing information system for Greenland. Using software engineering methods the implementation can be done according to the developed data model and initial database prototype. Development of the Greenland addressing system using a modern GIS and database technology would ease the work and improve the quality of public services such as: postal delivery, emergency response, customer/business relationship management, administration of land, utility planning and maintenance and public statistical data analysis.
Highlights
Addresses are the most commonly used way of referencing a location in the world
To name a few purposes for addressing systems, they are for postal delivery, emergency service response, land administration, utility planning and maintenance and public statistical surveying
A geographical overview of addresses can be used in land administration
Summary
Addresses are the most commonly used way of referencing a location in the world. Countries have various addressing schemas and their differences are mostly evolved due to historical, cultural reasons e.g. in Europe most of addressing schemas are similar and reference a road network, while addressing system in Asia, e.g., Japan comprise hierarchy of administrative areas without referencing road names (Coetzee, S., June 2011). To name a few purposes for addressing systems, they are for postal delivery, emergency service response, land administration, utility planning and maintenance and public statistical surveying. For mail delivery and emergency service handling a precise reference point is needed, identifying an individual recipient point or place of incident. There is a problem in the way of communicating the precise location of an incident to emergency services e.g. the police. There has been encountered a scenario when police department had been reported about an incident, but due to ambiguity in referencing the location, the incident had not been handled. When a police officer had received the reporting call, he was inquiring for the address where the incident had happened. In order to be clear and distinctive for future incident handling, improvements have to be introduced to minimize the risks of ambiguities
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