CARES Spatial

Incidents of environmental harm reported by members of the public include issues such as spillages, noise, marine and odour complaints. These complaints are handled by EPA staff, and by local government environmental officers who are also able to administer the EP Act. The Complaints and Reports of Environmental Significance (CARES) system was developed to record environmental incidents. CARES allows EPA, PIRSA and council staff to log details of incidents and allocate an incident to an individual officer to handle, or even reassign it to another agency if necessary. E-mails are used to notify agencies and staff of an incident that needs to be handled.

The aim of the CARES Spatial module is to develop a spatial tool set designed to facilitate the display of incident data collected in the CARES System. When a user logs an incident, there are three different address fields that can be captured: the address of the caller, the incident and the alleged offender. It is through the geocoding of these address fields that a spatial context for a map may be obtained. To "Geocode" an address means to find a point location in a known geographic coordinate system in order to be able to plot the address on a map. A geocoding component to the CARES application became necessary with the advent of CARES Spatial and the desire of users to view incidents on a map.

Address Geocoding Service

The CARES Address Geocoding Service module was created by LISAsoft to meet this need for address locations to be geocoded using an updated and reliable source. It was decided that an automatic geocoding process should take place behind the scenes when logging or modifying an incident, providing minimal disruption to a user logging an incident over the phone. A geocoding web-service developed by LISAsoft called "TerraCode", based on G-NAF (Geocoded National Address File) was used on the project.

The CARES Spatial module and the Address Geocode Service is an extension of the CARES system so all users can access information in a spatial format. CARES is a web based application developed in Java, storing its data in an Oracle database.