Difference between revisions of "Auxiliary Data"

Revision as of 17:06, 23 March 2015

To View, Add, Edit and Delete Auxiliary Data, your IMSMANG user account must belong to a User Role that has permission with Read and Write level. Contact your IMSMANG Administrator if you have questions on permissions.

Auxiliary data provide supplementary or additional information to items and include Country Structure, Assistance classification, Cause classification, Needs classification, Ordnance classification, Organisations and Places. Note that Tasks are not included in neither items or auxiliary data.

Assistance, Cause and Needs classifications

These classifications are used in Assistance and Victim items.

• Cause for someone having become a victim
• Needs that the victim is assessed to have
• Assistance that the victim has received

They are as the Country Structure tree structures. Ideally, a Mine Action Programme uses official, countrywide classifications that ensures mine action information is compatible with other national datasets. IMSMA^NG contains a set of pre-defined levels of classifications. These should be seen as a starting point for discussions in each Mine Action and/or Assistance Programme.

These classifications may have maximum of ten levels. These classification can be extensive and therefore the Advanced Search functionality is useful for finding what you are looking for. The inspiration classifications that serve a starting point for discussions in each Mine Action and/or Assistance Programme can be downloaded in Excel files from here.

Country Structure

The Country Structure represents a gazetteer, the political or administrative divisions within a country. In IMSMA^NG, the Country Structure allows a Mine Action Programme to link Mine Action information to areas and report statistics such as number of victims per province or district. Ideally, a Mine Action Programme uses an official, countrywide Country Structure that ensures mine action information is compatible with other national datasets.

Ideally, the Country Structure in IMSMA^NG, covers all levels of the existing Country Structure, from the country level down to a level that can be represented with a single point such as a town or village. If a Mine Action Programme has special levels such as Areas of Responsibility that do not exist in the Country Structure, artificial levels may be inserted into the Country Structure in IMSMA^NG.

To display a Country Structure node like a town or village on the map, it is necessary to add a geographic coordinate for the node.

If the Country structure is extensive and/or in several languages then the Advanced Search is useful for finding what you are looking for and in version 6.0 it is also possible to search on Alternative names.

Ordnance Classification

This classification is used in Land, Activities and Accidents. IMSMA^NG includes from the installation more than 5,000 predefined ordnance models. All ordnance is grouped according to categories and subcategories. For example, an ordnance may have a category of “Landmine” and a subcategory of “Antipersonnel.” In this way, IMSMA^NG provides the ability not only to search and report on models but summarise information on categories and subcategories. This allows queries such as “how many landmines or bombs were cleared in a specific period?” or “how many anti-personnel mines were found?”.

Other categories than Landmines have ordnance that belong to the subcategory Anti-Personnel so if you only want to report on AP-mines you need to filter on both category and subcategory.

Furthermore, Mine Action Programmes can limit which ordnance can be used for data entry by making ordnance inactive. To making only the ordnance that may be found in the country facilitates both data entry and data quality.

IED, Less-lethal weapons, Light weapons, MANPADS, Small Arm Ammunitions and Small Arms are new Categories. The new models belonging to the above categories are Inactive. The new field Statistic Group has been added in order to facilitate flexible reporting.

Organisations

IMSMA^NG provides the ability to track information about Organisations participating in Mine Action. Organisations can be categorised by type and assigned “work areas” based on the Country Structure.

Additionally, IMSMA^NG supports the creation of parent-child relationships with organisations so that information managers can create hierarchies of organisations. For example, a mine clearance organisation may be responsible for several clearance teams within a country. As shown in the figure below, this relationship can be mapped by creating one organisation for the mine clearance organisation (NGO1) and one organisation for each team (TeamA, TeamB and TeamC), then specifying the parent organisation of each team as NGO1.

This kind of hierarchical relationship allows for complex searching and reporting on information such as how many square meters were cleared by each team and the total square meters that were cleared by the entire organisation.

IMSMA^NG also supports the tracking of competencies and accreditations for each organisation.

Places

IMSMA^NG offers the option to track information about specific places or infrastructure elements within a country that are relevant to Mine Action. These can be ammunition storages, armouries, airports, community centres, hospitals, refugee camps or any other structures/buildings which designate a political, economic, social, and/or logistical value.

Places can be linked to:

• Land and Activities to represent the nearest medical facilities
• Land and Activities to represent ammunition storage or armoury
• Victim to represent hospital
• Assistance to represent Place where the Assistance took place
• Education activities to represent the location of the activity

As with other IMSMA^NG data, Places may be represented on the map by adding geospatial information. Place may be represented on the map as both points and polygons e.g. for a refugee camp the polygon indicates larger area around the camp where people are moving for collection food and water.

Ammunition storage and Armoury have been added to Place Type

Import Auxiliary Data

To import auxiliary data using an Excel spreadsheet, refer to XLS import.