GeoComm Completes North Dakota Statewide Seamless Base Map Project

St. Cloud, MN: GeoComm is pleased to announce the completion of a multi-year Statewide Seamless Base Map project with North Dakota’s Department of Emergency Services (DES). This project, which began in 2012, included building road centerline and address point layers for each of the 53 counties in North Dakota. To accomplish this project efficiently and effectively, the project was completed in three phases.

Phases two and three, which were completed simultaneously, began in July 2013 and completed in April 2016. Phase one, which was completed in May 2013, consisted of developing the two required GIS data layers for 22 counties in the central part of North Dakota. These phases focused on completing the same GIS data layers, for the remaining 31 counties in Western and Eastern North Dakota.

Throughout all of the phases, the North Dakota DES and GeoComm collaborated to develop a project plan that ensured the completed Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data would meet public safety industry accuracy standards and would not exceed the state’s available funding. Throughout the project, GeoComm utilized available resources, such as newly acquired aerial imagery from the State’s Department of Transportation, road centerlines built from this aerial imagery, and address point data, coupled with fieldwork methods to create a highly accurate statewide base map.

Now that all three phases are complete, The State of North Dakota DES has a statewide seamless base map meeting public safety industry standards. This seamless base map will improve interoperability across the state’s Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) and will enable them to more easily act as backup centers for one another when needed. In addition, with the emergence of Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1), the state also benefits by having this statewide dataset available for use in the future to route calls based on their GIS location.

About GeoComm: GeoComm (www.geo-comm.com) was founded in 1995 to provide county governments with turnkey emergency 9-1-1 development services. Over the subsequent 20 years, the company has grown to serve more than 12,000 dispatchers in 800 emergency 9-1-1 call centers in the United States, helping to keep more than 84 million people safe. Today, GeoComm has a national reputation as a leading provider of geographic information and communication systems. The company’s systems route emergency calls to the appropriate call center, map the caller’s location on call taker or dispatcher maps, and guide emergency responders to the scene of the incident on mobile displays within police, fire and ambulance vehicles.