SEAM
DATAPRO: EMERGENCY PERSONNEL CONTACT TOOL
Problem:
Currently no centralized mechanism for locating or identifying their colleagues. Montgomery County Police officers have a variety of specialized skills including Accident reconstruction, counter terrorism, and K9 training; unfortunately determining location or contact information of these officers is currently a manual process. Since approaching us in fall 2003, MCPD has worked with SEAM to provide a software solution to solve this problem. While some of this information exists in many databases, SEAM was asked to provide a solution that augments existing MCPD Databases with additional information, and presents it in a single application used by officers and Station commanders.
Solution:
Members of the SEAM group last semester began work on a solution that would meet the needs of the Montgomery County Police. An application with a client/server architecture, designated MCPD DataPro, was developed using Java that made use of existing enterprise solutions, such as Apache Tomcat and XML Webservices. This application could be deployed on a central server and allow Station Commanders to access all the information needed about their personnel from over their internal network.
Spring 2004:
Work on this project has continued this semester with a version ready to be validated by police headquarters. Once validated and deployed, usability data will be gathered so that enhancements can be made by future semesters to address the changing needs of the customer. The success of this application is the result of the close collaboration between the MCPD and the students involved with the SEAM lab.