02 · Current
The work
Groundtruth 911 is software for the people who maintain the 911 GIS data underneath every emergency call. The MPH is how I learn to make that work at the scale of an entire population, rather than one county at a time. They are one project, and this page is where each of them actually stands.
I'm building Groundtruth 911, and I'm getting a Master of Public Health, and those are not two disparate things. Groundtruth is where I test what I'm learning against real-world jurisdictions and data. The MPH is where I learn to build for whole communities instead of one county at a time. Each one feeds the other on a weekly basis: I pull Groundtruth into my coursework as the working example, and I pull the coursework into Groundtruth as the rationale for a given decision.
I came into this from the field, the support desk, the data, and the product. Now the population level. Not sequentially by accident, cumulatively on purpose. Most people building for public safety have sat in one of those chairs. The distance between how a system is designed and how it's actually lived in is exactly the distance between those seats, and I've been in all of them.
Which is why I'm building from the ground up and on universal design: the widest range of people should be able to use the thing without needing a workaround. Not accessibility bolted on at the end. Designed that way from the first decision.
Groundtruth 911
Groundtruth 911 is a DBA of Kaitlin LLC. It is where I build practical tools for NG9-1-1 GIS work and share what I learn as I build them.
I build for the people who know their local data better than anyone else, but often maintain it while doing three other jobs. My goal is not to replace that judgment. It is to give people better tools and clearer information so they can use their judgment well.
The name comes from remote sensing. 'Ground truth' is what is actually there when you stand on the spot that a satellite photographed from above. Public safety GIS depends on the same agreement between the map and the ground. When they do not match, the consequences are real.
NENA Schema Converter
Beta testing open
The NENA Schema Converter is a free ArcGIS Pro toolbox with one focused job: converting NG9-1-1 GIS data between NENA schema versions.
The current release candidate supports:
- NENA-STA-006.1.1-2020 > NENA-STA-006.2a-2023
- NENA-STA-006.2a-2023 > NENA-STA-006.3-2026 flat-file Esri File Geodatabase model
The converter creates a new output geodatabase and leaves the source data unchanged. It can work with local layer and field names via an explicit schema map, so users can tell it what their fields mean rather than relying on the tool to guess.
Each run produces a readable log and a detailed manifest. You can see what moved, what changed mechanically, and what still needs a person to review.
This beta is only for the NENA Schema Converter. It is not a beta release of the larger Groundtruth validation tool.
The testing package includes fictional sample data, so you do not need to use organizational data to participate. If you are comfortable testing with a copy of your own authorized data, that is welcome too, but it is not required. The more schemas and datasets we test, the better I can make the converter for the NG9-1-1 community.
If you maintain NG9-1-1 GIS data and would like to participate, email me at hi@kaitlinquinn.com with “NENA Beta” in the subject line.
Groundtruth Validation Tool
Internal testing in progress
Local, jurisdiction-aware validation of NG9-1-1 GIS data against NENA standards, running on your machine instead of a vendor's server.
I pulled requirements straight from the NENA standard and turned them into rules the tool actually checks. Not a reference doc, working logic: field completeness, geometry validity, topology - the checks a jurisdiction is supposed to run before submitting data and usually has no tooling for. Coverage spans the standard's core layers, road centerlines, site structure address points, and the boundary layers that tie them together. Every rule has run against known-good and known-bad data to confirm it catches what it should and stays quiet when it shouldn't. There's an SOP behind it, so a run means the same thing on a Tuesday as it does on a Friday.
Next: internal pressure testing against real jurisdiction data, hunting the edge cases that break clean logic in ways a standard's text never anticipates. No public release until it survives that.
Public health
I'm in the MPH program at OHSU-PSU in Portland, Oregon, and I'm pointing it at public safety.
I came for the institutional knowledge: how you actually move a whole community's outcomes, what evidence gets a policy changed, how population-level intervention works when you can't hand-configure it one county at a time. I know how to fix a system for the person in front of me. I'm here to learn how to fix it for everyone at once.
As I write for the program, I'll collect the pieces worth reading here. Coursework that turned into something, arguments I'm still building, the places where public health and public safety turn out to be the same subject wearing different jargon.
If you work in NG9-1-1 GIS and want to be one of the first people to break either of these, tell me: hi@kaitlinquinn.com