[Talk-GB] Defibrillator (AED) Mapping via The Circuit

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Thu, 19 May 2022 at 17:13, Aniket Garg <aniket.garg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I was looking at mapping defibrillators, and was wondering if someone had reached out to The Circuit, the new(ish) initiative to make a national defibrillator database? I can see it was mentioned as a possibility on the 2020 Q4 Quarterly Project page, but can’t find any further details.
>
> The Circuit has since launched a map which uses Mapbox (i.e. OSM) and I think there’s a good possibility they would cooperate – they could use OSM data to identify defibrillators that are missing from their database and vice versa.

It would be great if we could. I've previously collated data from
individual ambulance services, and have a tool that compares this data
to that in OSM: https://osm.mathmos.net/defib/ . Not all ambulance
services have agreed to release their data, and some of the datasets
are now quite out of date though.

There's obvious benefits to OSM in having access to the builk national
dataset. Though, I think we'd still want to manually survey the
locations (rather than import/merge) so we can get the locations
correct relative to other mapped features. Also (as has already been
pointed out in this thread) not all the locations in the Circuit are
accurate.

>From their side, I think the flagging of discrepancies could be very
useful to them, but I'm not sure how well set up they are to make use
of such feedback. My understanding is that they rely on the AED owners
('guardians') to register them. So OSM saying, "we think you're
missing an AED at XXX" isn't directly useful. Someone would need to
find the guardian, and persuade them to register their AED with the
Circuit. But maybe local community-minded mappers might do this, if
there was a convenient list available. A location discrepancy could be
more useful to the Circuit, as they could use that info to trigger an
"Are you sure the location is correct?" type message to the registered
guardian.

Anyway, I've just sent an email to the address at the bottom of
https://www.thecircuit.uk/frequently-asked-questions to see if there's
any possibilty in us getting their data to use.

Best wishes,

Robert.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Robert%20Whittaker
https://osm.mathmos.net/