Project is currently well into development, work is progressing well and the core technical work has been completed. Asthetics, interface and data tweaking - dev site viewable at http://abdm.jonhay.co.uk/

In 2008 there were 2,538 people killed in road traffic accidents across the UK and the total number of people injured in road traffic accidents totalled 149,188. Across the UK there are thousands of accident blackspots that prove to be considerable hazards to road user, however there is currently no effective means of highlighting these blackspots to drivers.

With the revolution of satellite navigation and online journey planning more effective methods are available to warn drivers that they are entering a known hazardous area encouraging them to reduce their speed and pay more attention to the road. Currently not such system exists to warn users of accident blackspots even though the data is available via a police agency. The data itself is comprised of a keyed series of spreadsheets which outline every accident, its location and the broad outline of who was involved usually over a 4 year period.

The aim throughout this project is to develop a system that can be integrated into both SatNav and a major mapping system such as Google maps to provide journey planning and real time road alerts to drivers travelling throughout the UK using and manipulating the readily available police accident data into a usable and easily understandable format.

The Police record details of all road traffic accidents in a text file available for download from the UK data archive. The files themselves comprise of a tab delimitated set of data with a wide range of data on each accident. The data itself is provided with a PDF which gives an insight into the complex keying system used through the data. The first challenge is to decide what data is relevant and what isn't. The records themselves cover an incremental 4 year period so the system must be able to accept new data and ignore existing data to provide maintainability.

One of the primary challenges of the data manipulation is to accurately convert Ordinance Survey grid references used in the police accident data to latitude and longitude, once converted the data can be easily converted many different medians including KML (Google maps) and Points of Interest (POI) commonly used for GPS systems such as SatNav’s.

Other technical challenges involve weighting and grouping all the accidents to establish actual consistent blackspots as well as translating this data into statistical information to be provided via a database driven web interface. This would then be integrated into Google maps or similar as a journey planning application to highlight an potential danger zones throughout the route.

I will update this with more technical information at a later date when I have more concrete program design to showcase.