Requirement
The National Environmental Emergency Center at Environment Canada needed a system to track and report on environmental emergencies. When an emergency took place in the field, officers of the Department would go on site to determine the nature of the problem, and to work with provincial and other agencies to coordinate actions.
The paper based system that was in place presented two major short comings. First, it was difficult for the field officer to keep all the necessary people up to date with the state in the field. Second, it was no simple way for the anyone to determine if there had been a similar incident before, and what actions should be taken.
Implementation by RKIL
RKIL developed a system that allowed the field officers to create an incident report in the field, then through a single dial up connection to the Internet, replicate this information to the provincial office as well as the national office. The officer could update the incident report at any time, and by changing the rating of the incident bring it to the attention of senior staff across the country.
The technology allowed the officers to take the entire 800,000 records from the data base in the field with them on their laptop computers to be able to refer to previous incidents as well as to search for the effects of specific chemicals.
The system developed by RKIL makes use of Lotus Notes. The system can dynamically switch between English and French at any time during the application.
The system uses a client/server architecture with Notes running on Macintosh and Windows clients, and using Lotus Notes on Windows NT with TCP/IP as the data base engine.