Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Hard Copy Distribution Ending

Effective January 1, 2010 the Bureau will discontinue paper distribution of Advance Planning Circulars. These circulars will be available via our website to registered users, who are employees of insurers.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

ISRB PCC is Back

The Protection Class Calculator is back. We have not hear if it back in its primary facility or if it is still in the backup facility.

Friday, July 3, 2009

ISRB PCC is Dark

Last night the facility housing the PCC production server has a fire. As a result the facility lost power and the Protection Class Calculator went dark. The system administrator is bringing up their colocation. We should be up again from this location, this evening.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

New Geocoding Service Going Live

Late in the afternoon on June 25th the Protection Class Calculator will be moving the geocoding service from ESRI to Virtual Earth (Currently Know As Bing). This change will slightly change some of the results. The Bing service provides a more up-to-date dataset using a combination of data sources. If the returns you get are questionable, please let us know so we can help you clarify and if needed verbally override the calculator results. Our e-mail address is info@isrb.com.

The ISRB PCC is available both to registered users of our website (www.isrb.com) and as a web service. Watch for some enhancements to the information available from the calculator.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

PC Calculator Testing New Service

The ISRB PCC runs using webservices. The ISRB does not attempt to maintain a database of geocoded addressess for the State of Idaho. The current Geocoding service ESRI is discontinuing there service. The PCC has been recoded to access the webservice provided by Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Virtual Earth we are told uses a combination of NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas data.
We are testing the new service by running request we receive through both the production server and the test server. What we have found that is some parts of Idaho Virtual Earth codes to what appears to be the front door of a building. In other part it codes to the street.

In places where it codes to the street we get good matches between the two systems. However the coding to the building has presented some problems. Let me explain. The returned geocode or Lat/Long is projected on a dataset resembling a polygon called a shapefile. A shapefile has been created that goes from every fire hydrant that we have geocoded, down the center of each and every street for a distance of 1,000 feet. The Shapefile is then expanded from the center of the street 50 feet on both sides and the end of the street. This watersystem shapefile represents the rule in the Public Protection Classification Manual - Idaho for how the distance to a fire hydrant is determined. When a returned geocode is at the building. The building may be back off the street more that 50 feet. We miss hitting the water layer by that much.

The other problem we have with both systems is that the street data geocoding. Does not always matchup well with the shapefiles we receive from the State of Idaho for taxing districts. We notice this most when boundaries touch and run down the center of streets.

Since the ESRI service is closing the end of June 2009. We will be changing soon.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Changes Comming to Protection Class Calculator

The geocoding service used by the ISRB Protection Class Calculator is being discontinued by ESRI. The Bureau has started the process of changing the service provided for the geocoding and routing information needed to process the public protection classess associated with an address.

Bases on advice from our software developer and other the calls for geocode and routing will be changed to a Microsoft service. Virtual Earth reports to use the best of both NAVtag and TeleAtlas data.

As the new code is completed, it will be tested before being put into production.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Adding Fields to Specific Loss Cost Database

The specific loss cost database currently has two tables. The addresses database provides the address for each risk as well as some underwriting information including the key to the fire defense provide. Within the next few months we will be adding a zip code field to the database, followed by fields for the Latitude Longitude and altitude.