Understanding IMSMA Information Model

Data Types

Items

In the IMSMA^NG information model, items are the containers for mine action information. An item is an area, activity or event that a mine action programme records information about and stores in IMSMA^NG. There are six categories of items, which are described in the table below. Each category can be characterized by a type that reflects whether the item is designed to track process or activity information or the object or product of an activity.

Comparison

Comparison of Standalone and Networked Configuration Options

Items are entered into IMSMA^NG by means of a field report. Typically, each category of items has its own field report template for recording information specific to that category. When entered into IMSMA^NG, all field report items must be assigned to a location, which is tied to the country’s gazetteer, or political or administrative structure. The items can then be traced back to the country structure so that users can easily report data such as the number and size of hazards within a particular province.

Part of defining and documenting an information model includes defining the useful information attributes for each IMSMA^NG item. IMSMA^NG comes with more than 1,000 data elements already defined as well as the capability to create additional custom-defined fields (CDFs). This makes it important to critically assess which data elements are useful to a programme for decision-making, analysis and reporting and to focus on those while ignoring data elements that don’t provide additional value. Limiting information to only that which is useful to the programme provides long-term benefits including reducing the data collection and data entry burden and improving system performance. And, while many data elements may be collected for each IMSMANG item, some elements may be more important for analysis than others. For example, whether a victim has been injured or killed may be more important for analysis than the victim’s nationality.

Item Subcategories

Each of the six categories of items can be divided into subcategories or types so users can collect information for each subcategory. For example, users can specify different types of hazards such as dangerous areas, confirmed hazardous areas (CHAs), minefields and battle areas and manage each kind of hazard differently. Using subcategories, information managers can:

• create separate workflows for each type of hazard
• create and manage separate data entry forms
• differentiate between item categories on the map

Additionally, information managers can customise the subcategories so that unused subcategories can be removed and other subcategories added. The same is true for all top-level items within IMSMA^NG, which lets information managers specify their exact information model, including the relationships among item categories, and adjust the model as their needs change over time. To accurately map the information model for a programme, it’s helpful to evaluate the available item subcategories and determine if changes to the information model in IMSMA^NG are required. While these values can be customized after system setup, understanding the types of information for each item is critical to implementing an effective workflow in IMSMA^NG. Table 5 shows examples of the possible subcategories of IMSMA^NG items.

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Auxiliary Data

In addition to defining the required information for IMSMA^NG items, it is important to define the relevant information to be collected about auxiliary data. This includes defining and documenting the country structure, ordnance, organisations and places, such as military bases, hospitals and cultural sites; any additional CDFs that should be created; and any subcategories for each of the auxiliary data types.

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