Suitability of georeferenced civic address databases for use with geographical public alerting systems in the Maritime provinces (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island)

Emergency preparedness is currently one of the highest priorities at all levels of government in Canada. To assist in fulfilling its mandate to protect the public, the New Brunswick Department of Public Safety (NB DPS) is developing a Geographical Public Alerting System (GPAS). The GPAS employs a Geographic Information System and a georeferenced civic address database (GCADB) to generate a list of recipients, in a geographically defined area, and issues a warning message via telephone, digital device, e-mail, or pager. This system's reliance on a GCADB necessitates an investigation of GCADBs and their suitability for use with this or other public alerting system.; The purpose of this investigation is to compare the characteristics of the GCADBs in the three Maritime provinces. These databases are in various states of completion and the practices employed by each of the Provinces have been unique in terms of the selection of a reference point for the civic address data. In this study, the functional requirements of the Geographic Public Alerting System are examined and the suitability of the three provincial GCADBs will be compared with respect to these requirements.; Results of this investigation conclude that although all three provincial databases are suitable for use with the GPAS, some are better suited than others. The differentiating characteristic is the selection of the address point. As such, the best-suited database was that which utilised the building centroid as the address point, followed by the driveway access, and finally the parcel identifier label point.