At the request of OpenStreetMap Ireland, I am sharing the lessons learnt from collecting AED data in Poland. I hope to also help other local OpenStreetMap communities with this type of project.

Instead of an introduction.

There is no official record system for these devices in Poland. Both of these databases are closed and the locations of AEDs they contain are highly imprecise, with descriptions missing in many places and the accuracy leaving much to be desired. Our initial analysis has shown that there is little or no usefulness of this data for rescuers.

For this reason, we have decided to start collecting this data and, in order to facilitate this process, to prepare a portal that will support us in this task and, at the same time, display the devices already entered in order to motivate non-OSMP editors to search for and enter their locations into OpenStreetMap. I will try my best to describe the process we have arrived at by trial and error during this project.

Make a plan!

A necessary step was to adopt a minimum usability label for the location of the devices by talking to colleagues involved professionally or voluntarily in the emergency services, and to turn their comments and experiences into a uniform way of labelling AEDs. The fruits of this work can be found on the Polish wiki page: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Pl:Tag:emergency%3Ddefibrillator.

Thanks to the team who created the dedicated AED portal. And is currently working on its international version openaedmap.org, we have had a much easier process of gathering information and greater reliability. Thanks are especially due Tomek, Ancymon, Filip and many others.

We took the tags access and defibrillator:location as key. The following table describes exactly how we standardised the tags for access:

value	meaning
yes	The device is freely accessible to the public, usually in a capsule located outside the building.
customers	The device is available during the opening hours of the building, usually in a locker or capsule located inside the building.
private	The device has very limited access and requires the consent and participation of a third party, is most often located in a room or remote part of a building with difficult access, or can be moved. For example, we mark devices located in the vehicles of volunteer fire brigades as such

In our case, the next step was to prepare a database of local government units, which seemed a logical choice. There are more than 2,500 of these institutions in Poland. With such a number, we decided to conduct a mailing campaign. I developed a form in .doc format and the text of a request for a description of the unit’s location. Thanks to Pooh01, we managed to obtain the telephone number of a VOIP hotline with software, which we wanted to use as a contact point for local authorities. At this Stage, the email and information campaign was led by 2 coordinators. Here, continued thanks to them and the enormous amount of work they put into the project. Thx Pooh01 and Ronczka We divided all these institutions into 3 and set up to send out in groups of no more than 100 - 150 emails in one batch.

After the first group of emails was sent, the data collection form was converted into an .xls table and we made it possible to add this information via a google form. All the time we also informed about the possibility to add data from the portal aed.openstreetmap.pl

Conclusions of this phase

• The helpline did not work out due to technical limitations
• After sending enquiry emails, each parcel was followed by a wave of phone calls for about 2-3 days, you have to be prepared for this, usually several people tried to call me at one time. On the other hand, without many hours of calls, it would not have been possible to obtain so many localizations.
• The form must be legible and prepared in tabular form, preferably in .xls format.
• It was a good idea to add a link to the google form. In this way we collected the data of about 300 devices
• Some of the institutions replied in the form of a traditional letter or a scanned signed .pdf document, which takes much longer to enter.
• A dedicated website with the possibility to enter the data (You already have openaedmap.org at your disposal!) proved to be indispensable

Data, data and more data

All acquired data were entered on the fly into a prepared google sheet where they were initially standardised. It was necessary to verify them and standardise all the data. A colleague Marek verified the data, and without his painstaking work it would not have been possible to enter these localizations so quickly. We also tried to translate the description of the locations into English.

Conclusions of this phase

Responses from individual institutions contained many errors:

• poorly legible descriptions of the locations had to be revised
• the coordinates of the individual units were given in different formats and had to be converted and standardised
• errors in the given coordinates to enable their automatic verification
• inconsistencies in the address data for the given coordinates
• some locations were sent from several institutions and we had problems with duplicate data

The standardisation process took much longer than expected. The final standardisation was done in OpenRefine

Entering data into OpenStreetMap.

Here, thanks are due to Mordechai23, who developed an efficient standard for entering AED locations in Josm and their additional verification at the time of entry. Efficient data entry was made possible by using the ToDo plug-in. The person entering the data performed further data verification.

Conclusions from this stage:

• Data packets contained around 30-50 devices at a time
• Packets were created based on location and similar attributes
• Entry of opening hours, if required, was done in JOSM using a plug-in OpeningHoursEditor
• Additional facilities had to be tagged, e.g. buildings containing equipment, shelters, etc.
• On an ongoing basis, we filled in missing data in the vicinity of the AED equipment

Summary and conclusions

• Substantive support from the Foundation for the Development of Defibrillation in Poland gave us insight into the industry, regulations and recommendations for AEDs and was crucial in gaining medical patronage
• The patronages raised the credibility of the project in the eyes of the institutions
• Cooperation with Yanosik (It is a traffic alert system and free OSM-based navigation.) has allowed us to acquire data more quickly, and thanks to this cooperation, all the data is coming in
• Without a dedicated portal, it would not have been possible to obtain the information
• The group of people involved in the project from the data collection and editing side is a minimum of 4-5 people for Poland

It was fun, but what about now?

Data on AEDs in Poland is gradually increasing. Currently, this is due to a functioning portal and data from Yanosik users. Therefore, we want to focus on the development and promotion of the openaedmap.org website. At the same time, it is an excellent form of promoting OpenStreetMap and the idea of free data.

We would be grateful for any help in this regard and invite all interested parties to contact us. Our plans for the platform are collected in SDD the document is currently in (PL) in the near future I will translate it into English