Difference between revisions of "Standardising Auxiliary Data"

Revision as of 21:12, 27 November 2012

Define the Country Structure Levels

Define the Country Structure Areas

Define Other Auxiliary Data

In addition to establishing the country structure in IMSMANG, information managers can establish other auxiliary data, including data for:

• organisations
• places
• explosive ordnance

While this information is easily updated during operational use of IMSMANG, it is helpful to establish a baseline of information prior to proceeding with field report template design and data entry. Many IMSMANG users already have a baseline set of information created for each of the auxiliary data types, either through the standard, predefined data available within IMSMANG or by migrating auxiliary data from a previous IMSMA version. Auxiliary data can also be augmented by creating CDFs to track additional information.

Organisations

IMSMANG provides the ability to track information about organisations participating in mine action. Organisations can be categorized by type and assigned “work areas” based on the country structure. To display organisations on the map, users can provide geospatial data for each organisation.

Additionally, IMSMANG 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.

IMSMANG also supports the tracking of competencies and accreditations for each organisation. The lists of specific competencies and accreditations can be managed in the Data Inventory Manager.

Places

IMSMANG offers the option to track information about specific places or infrastructure elements within a country that are relevant to mine action. These can be airports, water sources, hospitals, community centres, refugee camps or any other item of interest.

In IMSMANG, places can be linked to mine risk education activities to represent the location of the activity or they can be linked to hazards and hazard reduction activities to represent the nearest medical facilities.

As with other IMSMANG data, places can be customised using CDFs and represented on the map by adding geospatial information.

Explosive Ordnance

The final type of auxiliary data available in IMSMANG is explosive ordnance. This data is used to represent the various kinds of explosive ordnance found or cleared from hazards or that are causing accidents. IMSMANG includes more than 5,000 predefined ordnance types with the ability to create additional ordnance required for a mine action programme.

All explosive ordnance is grouped according to categories and subcategories, which allows for detailed categorization of each device. For example, an explosive device may have a category of “Landmine” and a subcategory of “Antipersonnel.” In this way, IMSMANG provides the ability not only to search and report on types of ordnance but also on the specific characteristics of ordnance. This allows queries such as “how many landmines or bombs were cleared in a specific period?” or “how many anti-personnel mines were found?”

Furthermore, programmes can limit which ordnance can be used within the system by making individual devices active or inactive. This facilitates rapid data entry by making available only the devices that are found locally to a programme.

Before beginning data entry, standardise the devices or types of devices available for use to ensure data consistency for reports. When adding a device to the database, determine if the device already exists in the predefined dataset as there are more than 5,000 devices from the ORDATA ordnance catalogue already in the system.