Electoral office seeks to connect addresses with geographical location

Malta’s government entities are trying to sort out an address data “situation” in which a lack of coordination between departments or authorities processing citizen data do not have unified addresses.

Entities in Malta have been creating and maintaining incongruent address data in their legacy systems for many years, with data sharing between public administration departments almost inexistent.

This scenario leads to the general public being requested to provide address details every time they are making use of a service.

Now Malta’s Address Management Unit, a subdivision of the Electoral Office, wants a solution that can restore “efficiency, consistency and confidence” to the lacklustre address systems employed by the government.

The Electoal Office is seeking a system that will also incorporate centralised and shareable data on addresses, with geospatial components, to provide one official source of address information. “The ‘golden thread’ of this solution is the linking of data between different entities through the use of a unique resource identifier (URI),” the Electoral Office said in a call to industry to provide it with the required software solution.

“The primary objectives of this solution are to eliminate the current inconsistencies in address data and to provide efficient address point data including its respective geospatial data.

“The solution needs to cater for the categorisation of various address types such as places of worship, cemeteries and bus shelters. Furthermore, the solution needs to use current technologies and be robust enough to handle large quantities of data, service requests and meet the necessary security and business continuity requirements.”