PA One Call and Sentinel USA Announce Land Base Development Partnership

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Jan 19, 2010, 03:29 ET

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 19 /PRNewswire/ --Today Pennsylvania One Call System, Inc. (West Mifflin, PA) and Sentinel USA (Newark, OH) announce a partnership to develop and maintain a unified Commonwealth of Pennsylvania land base for use by the One Call Center and its almost 3,400 underground facility owner members.

Goals of the partnership are to increase the quality and reduce the cost of maintenance of the maps and map updates used by PA One Call in its notification service for excavators and underground facility owners. Sentinel will gather base mapping information from public sector data sources throughout the state, consolidate all collected information into a single, seamless dataset, and normalize the dataset for use within PA One Call's "Phoenix" call center software.

The effort will also create reference points between underground facility information and the land base maps, significantly reducing the time, effort and cost of land base verification efforts by facility owner members when an updated version of the land base is introduced to the system.

"We're extremely pleased to work with Sentinel USA," said Bill Kiger, President and Executive Director. "Sentinel shares our vision that accurate and up to date maps are crucial to help excavators meet their PA Act 287, as amended obligations to provide accurate worksite information. Current and up to date maps will also help to improve our call times, reduce over notification to our members and raise the level of service we provide. This has a direct benefit on costs, customer satisfaction and public safety."

"We are delighted to have the opportunity to improve public safety in Pennsylvania as we've done in many other states' One Call centers," said Dan Colby, Sentinel's president. "The partnership will provide PA One Call with direct control over their land base, begin with high volume geographies of the Commonwealth and migrate to the entire Commonwealth within three years. PA One Call will phase out their existing land base and replace it with the 'open source' data created via this partnership."

About Pennsylvania One Call System, Inc: PA One Call is the "Call Before You Dig" nonprofit that serves the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. PA One Call began service to 6 underground facility members in 1972, and today serves more than 3,300 underground facility owner members and more than 100,000 contractors with 650,000 requests for notification and more than 6 million notifications per year.

About Sentinel USA: Sentinel USA Inc. has been providing GIS related services for the utility and geo-spatial market place since early 1997. Sentinel USA provides the utility industry and government agencies with geospatially-enabled process automation systems and related GIS services. The company is built upon a foundation of knowledgeable and skilled professionals experienced in a diverse array of GIS and GPS technologies and are recognized as one of the leading utility AM/FM, GIS service companies in North America today. The goal to educate and to inform their clients of the latest and most efficient technology has made Sentinel USA a front-runner in the utility digital mapping industry.

www.paonecall.org

SOURCE Pittsburgh Technology Council