GovernmentCity of PittsburghReturn to Government Success Story List"CORBA and 'Street Smarts' Keep City of Pittsburgh Emergency Personnel Safe " Contacts: Tools Used: Problem: Previously, to obtain crime and address history information, the police commander had to call CIS to submit a request. CIS would then write queries to extract the appropriate data from several disparate data sources, including 4 different databases on 4 different servers. These data sources stored Mayor's Service Center complaint calls, police records, building permits information, and 911 calls. The requested data would be merged, filtered, sorted, printed on paper and delivered to the police commander. This process could take hours, sometimes days, depending on the complexity of the information request and the workload of CIS. But CIS could not meet data requests within seconds, so emergency personnel were dispatched to locations with no knowledge of incidents at that location. Under Mayor Tom Murphy, the CIS department was charged with meeting the goal of an "information-based police force." This required CIS to create an environment that would provide police and other departments with information when they need it, where they need it, and in a format they can use. "We needed a technology solution that would enable us to provide City personnel with information when they need it, where they need it, and in a format they can use -- regardless of the number of different data sources. " added Staudacher. Solution: "Street Smarts" The solution is based on Cerebellum Software Inc.'s Cerebellum v1.2, which uses CORBA and the Java 2 platform to enable operating system and data independence. CORBA is used within the Cerebellum product to provide a communications layer between objects on different machines that need to share information. The use of CORBA enables Cerebellum and the City of Pittsburgh to integrate data from the various databases for presentation through one simple interface, without actually moving the data from the original sources. CIS contracted Cerebellum Software, Inc. to implement the software and to train the IT staff to use the product and to develop new applications that could quickly and easily access data from disparate sources. The development of the Street Smarts application took approximately two months from concept through final presentation. Cerebellum makes fast application development possible because it eliminates the data access and integration work necessary to build new applications. Because of the secure and personal nature of much of the crime and address information being accessed, Cerebellum's GUI allows CIS database administrators to manage user access. The Street Smarts application was also designed to limit the information that would be presented to end users. "Streets Smarts is a wonderful tool to assist the 911 shift supervisors on collect historical data about a residence and relay that information to the responding police,fire and emergency medical units in the field. We are looking forward to upgrading the system with more fields that would be helpful for our dispatchers, responding units and the 911 management staff." states Donna Duncan, City of Pittsburgh 911 shift supervisor. "We feel comfort knowing that we can ensure their safety by informing them of any known problems at a residence before their arrival." How the System Works The benefits of the new system are faster access, flexibility and security. During the Cerebellum implementation, CIS began to replace its older ATT 3B2, Novell, and Bull System servers with Sun 450s and migrated all the previous databases to Oracle 7. The queries are simply bound to the new data sources by using Cerebellum's GUI, and Cerebellum generates the appropriate code. No redesign of the queries is necessary. Project Roll-Out |