Covering 1,647 square kilometers of England, the scenic National Parks, Dartmoor and Exmoor are filled with a variety of wildlife, landscapes, moorlands, historic buildings and settlements. Keeping track of some 200,000 geographic addresses was not exactly a walk in the park.

Dartmoor’s and Exmoor’s National Park Authorities work with local and central government as well as the public to maintain local and national interests. In order to keep costs low and make life easier for its users, they are jointly taking the initiative to improve their geographic and address data management.

Under the Mapping Service Agreement (MSA), the National Parks are entitled to use the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) and are required to store address information. Dave Partridge, Geographic Information System Officer at Dartmoor said, “Dartmoor has a small IT team, with 4 permanent members of staff. We believe that the Aligned Assets solution will allow us to integrate our NLPG updates in an efficient manner with the minimum of our technical input. We just need something that works every time so we can concentrate on improving our service delivery.” Previously, the National Parks had to use different address formats in order to find geographic details; however, it was not providing them with a clear identification nor a concise description.

The ability to manage the data through a central address management system was an important step towards improving Dartmoor’s and Exmoor’s systems.  With the help from Aligned Assets’ Symphony Gazetteer and iSearchWeb products, the National Parks were able to fix their data management problems. According to Matt Sully, Geographic Information System Officer at Exmoor National Park Authority, “Symphony offered a very reasonable pricing package  that offers not only a way to administer address data, but iSearchWeb allows users us to look up addresses.”

With Symphony Gazetteer, the National Parks were able to integrate the initial data and support monthly uploads of NLPG data. Combining Symphony Gazetteer and iSearchWeb, allowed its users to search within the system and view NLPG data from their desktop via a link from Dartmoor and Exmoor’s Intranet.

Equipped with an easy to use interface, Dartmoor and Exmoor’s new address management systems have set a path for other parks to follow.