Barrodale Computing Services Signs New Contract with Elections British Columbia
Victoria, British Columbia - April 29, 2008 - Barrodale Computing Services Ltd. (BCS), a provider of advanced software solutions since 1978, today announced that Elections BC (EBC), a non-partisan office of the Legislature of British Columbia, has awarded BCS a $359,000 contract to support and enhance INDEA - an INtegrated Digital Electoral Atlas. This support will continue past the next Provincial Election, scheduled for May 12, 2009.
The INDEA software, a BCS product licensed to EBC, provides access to a comprehensive and continually updated network of roads and other basemap features, along with electoral boundaries, for the entire Province of BC. The primary function of INDEA is to provide EBC with an integrated electronic dataset on which to base its management of Provincial elections. Special functionality in INDEA has been provided to support EBC's needs for redistricting and maintenance of Electoral District (ED) and Voter Area (VA) boundaries, generation of a Street Index, assignment of voters to the appropriate ED and VA on the basis of geocoding their addresses, and map production.
The backbone of INDEA is an extensive set of road segments associated with address ranges. Each road segment can contain road segment geometric coordinates and values for a wide variety of attributes, such as name, aliases, left/right address ranges. Of these, the most important for EBC's purposes are the name and address ranges, since these allow geocoding of the addresses in their Voter Registry. The aim of the type of geocoding required by EBC is for INDEA to provide the correct ED and VA corresponding to any address in the Province. To support this aim, considerable effort has been devoted to making the assignment of address ranges as complete, accurate and current as possible.
Several complete and consistent boundary sets (i.e., the ED and VA boundaries at a particular time) are also maintained in INDEA as separate coverages. Additional coverages are also used to store an integrated set of municipal, Regional District, and Indian Reserve boundaries, as well as a reference set of community boundaries. These coverages are regularly reconciled with the roads layer to ensure that all crossings are noded, so that the administrative region (ED, VA, municipality, etc.) associated with any side of any road segment can be unambiguously determined. In addition, the boundary data have been rectified with any features (e.g., roads and hydrography) in the basemap layers with which they are meant to correspond.
INDEA is housed in an IBM Informix Dynamic Server object-relational database.
"The vast size of British Columbia (BC is larger than the States of California, Oregon, and Washington combined) poses unique challenges to Elections BC," stressed Michael Dunham-Wilkie, BCS Senior Database Analyst. "A new set of Electoral Districts will be in place for the next election, and polling districts will need to be substantially altered to reflect significant shifts in population. With the Integrated Digital Electoral Atlas providing a comprehensive and accurate geographic basis for elections management, EBC will be able to continue to carry out their mandate in a highly efficient, economical, and effective manner."
About BCSBCS is a British Columbia company that provides R&D consulting services, develops customized computer software, and markets database and technical applications software. BCS has successfully completed over 450 projects since 1978 by employing a well-qualified and experienced core staff, supplemented with the services of several international consultants. For further information, visit the BCS Web site at www.barrodale.com or contact BCS at (250) 472-4372.
