INDEA Functionality

The INDEA as a whole includes not only the database containing the roads and associated features, but also a comprehensive set of functions to operate on this data and allow for its updating and maintenance. These functions provide the capability to perform operations such as:

• Geocoding. Address geocoding takes a street address as input and returns the Electoral District (ED) and Voter Area (VA) corresponding to that address. Point geocoding returns the latitude and longitude corresponding to the input address.
• Data management. An INDEA Data Manager utility has been developed for EBC to update its sets of ED and VA boundaries, roads and background features of the INDEA.
• Map production. An extensive facility has been provided for EBC to use the INDEA data to produce several map series. This facility provides tools for road density analysis, inset generation and management, automated labeling, generation of required tables and border component generation and placement.
• Export. Selected contents of the INDEA (i.e., particular features within a region of interest) can be specified and extracted into an ESRI shapefile.
• Time travel. The INDEA supports versioning; i.e., as a particular feature is replaced or updated, the original feature is retired, but is still maintained in the database. This allows rollback to obtain that version of the data which was in effect at a previous point in time.