Just when the world seems to be shrinking, with the rapid speed of travel, and even faster communication, there seem to be an increasing number of threats to personnel safety for corporate travellers. Companies and their employees need to be fully aware of the risks in each area of the world, or where to turn if something goes wrong. Blue CRM (www.bluecrm.co.uk) provide a risk analysis and personnel tracking service via an application installed onto mobile phones that transmits GPS locations back to a SQL Server database. We, bVisual ltd, are a data visualisation company (www.bvisual.net) that has been developing with MapPoint since 1999, and more lately with Virtual Earth, so Blue CRM asked us to develop an application for the crisis response centre (CRC) where hundreds of personnel locations can be observed from all over the world, and, when required, specific locations can be analysed in detail to provide locational and contextual information, such as the nearest airport, hospital, or police station. Blue CRM’s CEO recently stated the case for this service in the Sunday Times (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/support_services/article6035680.ece ).
Our solution, called WorldViewer, provides an interactive map, shaded according to the current risk status of each country, a number of data listing panels, all written in WPF, and embedded, AJAX controlled Virtual Earth maps. The application is extended over multiple large screens in Blue CRM's control centre, and on each observing analyst’s desktop, in addition to any authorised user who wishes to access the system remotely.
We took the decision to use WPF because the client is using Windows in the CRC, and because there are many hundreds of gps locations to display. We were able to use the data-binding capabilities of WPF to link the various datasets to the XAML graphics, and even filter thousands of records almost instantaneously when the cursor moves over a position on the risk map, revealing the nearest significant place, such as an embassy, without the need to search any other database.
The gps application subscriber details and locations are retrieved from the SQL Server database via a secure web-service, which limits the visible data by the assigned login. This enables each client organisation to group, and monitor, their own subscribers. In addition, they can add their own intelligence by creating risk zones using KML files that can be authored directly in the WorldViewer application, or imported from elsewhere. Similarly, geo-fences and itineraries can be created for single or groups of subscribers.
Subscribers can be selected by organisation, group or service level, and the location data can be filtered by date, since the gps trails are stored within the database.
Selected subscriber gps trails can be projected onto the Virtual Earth map, or saved to KML files which can be opened in other applications (3D tours in Maps Live has proved popular!). We automatically time-stamped and numbered the way-points and increased the thickness and opacity of the gps trails as time progresses.
We provide the ability to draw geo-fences and itineraries (points, linestrings and areas) onto the Virtual Earth map, which are then saved as KML files and assigned to a subscriber, or a group of subscribers. We have defined extra tags within the description property of placemarks so that country, risk, tolerance, travel method, and even timeband, can be described simply, either by the WorldViewer application, or by one of the variety of KML creators out there, such as Maps Live.
We have integrated and extended the WPF Virtual Earth Control demonstrated by Marc at Microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2008/06/24/wpf-and-virtual-earth-revisited.aspx) which provides a C# wrapper to the JavaScript functions in the embedded html page. This approach enabled us to bind the Virtual Earth control to our WPF UI selections quite simply, and we even provided call-backs from the Virtual Earth tooltips to edit placemark data with WPF controls.
Alerts, both visual and audible, are created when a monitored subscriber location strays outside a defined geo-fence, or diverts from an expected itinerary, or if the subscriber hits the panic sequence on the handset. There are a few checks and balances, and then there is a response process that is followed to provide the necessary support.
Since the initial brief to create a crisis response centre application for BlueCRM, their own clients have insisted on installing the application in their own premises, so the application can now be installed and updated via ClickOnce. Extending the JavaScript functions to perform the operations that we required was a sobering experience, but wrapping them in C# quickly got us back into familiar coding territory. We are excited about the feature enhancements and speed improvements coming with the Silverlight Virtual Earth control and are currently working towards to a new version of our application by the end of year.