The Belgian National Crisis Center (NCCN) coordinates emergency response in Belgium, using the new Paragon platform. During emergencies, it is the place where all involved parties (police, health workers, fire brigade, …) form a common operational picture. A big part of that is knowing what infrastructure is on the ground, either for use as a resource or as a feature that needs protection.

This talk focuses on how we source this information from existing sources. We often use official data, but that has certain limitations when it comes to completeness, level of detail, data modelling and update cycle. That's why we rely heavily on OpenStreetMap data as well. Which of course has its own set of problems.

Within Paragon, this external data is used to enrich Cases (specific emergencies) and Emergency Plans. That means we need stable IDs across data updates. This talk will show how we use R to combine different data sources into one integrated dataset on our end, with largely stable IDs.

We will also touch upon how our processes detect problems in the datasets, and how we respond to them. Most significant are our steps to improve OpenStreetMap data, in cooperation with the OpenStreetMap community.