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Pick Best Process
The Facility Registry System (FRS) is the EPA database that identifies facilities subject to environmental regulations or of environmental interest. The FRS attempts to provide a complete and accurate record of key identification information about a facility to support data integration. One key identifier is geospatial data, the latitude and longitude and accompanying method, accuracy, and description data needed for recording the coordinates of the location of the facility on the earth. National program systems, Regions, and States all collect locational values for facilities and/or specific features of facilities (e.g., front doors, tanks, stacks, water release pipes). Additionally, improved sets of coordinates have been provided by geocoding efforts.Because the data may come from different sources, may have been determined by different methods, or may represent different locations within the facility boundary, multiple sets of coordinates may exist for one facility. Therefore, a process, named "Best-Pick", was developed to pick the "best" coordinates from a group to represent the facility on a map. The process is based on a series of business rules that evaluate the latitude and longitude, collection method, accuracy, and reference point description values to assign scores to prioritize the records. The major steps in the Pick-Best process are outlined below.
Major Steps in Pick-Best Process
- Evaluate Compliance
- Verify latitude/longitude lies within North America.
- Check for existence of values of mandatory data elements (See Environmental Data Registry (EDR) for Latitude/Longitude Data Standard http://www.epa.gov/edr/).
- Verify geometric boxes
- Automated checks compare the reported location to the reported state, county, and postal code using Oracle Spatial.
- Calculate a prioritization score
- A score is calculated, which is based on the assigned accuracy value of the collection method and the validation from the previous step.
- Prioritization
- The group of records is searched for the minimum score.