New Technologies
Building on the Latest Technologies
Bruce demonstrates MAST Online to users in London
Bruce Walton, an experienced data professional and now project manager for MAST, looks at how innovating with new technologies is allowing both software tools and the user community to develop.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when information analysis was often a task entrusted exclusively to IT specialists. If decision makers or practitioners attempted to put data to practical use, they would generally have little input into its provenance. It would frequently be provided in static paper reports, often outdated and sometimes misleading, and reliant on arbitrary assumptions made by technical staff who had no practical knowledge of how it might be interpreted or used.
Those days should now be gone for good, thanks to the dramatic technological progress seen in recent years. Potent advances in data analysis and information delivery techniques, along with improved user skill levels, mean there is now no good reason why the person who will put data to use should not also produce it. This approach has many advantages, such as improved speed and efficiency – but the most important is that data becomes so much more powerful when managers and other professionals can bring their own knowledge and experience to bear on it.
The MAST Project uses the latest analytical techniques to summarise large quantities of road safety information into storage structures known as data cubes. These form the base data behind MAST Online, a powerful point-and-click interface which provides users with flexible and intuitive direct access to the information. It is delivered via the internet, readily available from any platform which supports an ordinary web browser. No specialist IT knowledge or equipment is required, so all road safety stakeholders will be able to apply their expertise directly to an enormous data resource – without the need of dedicated specialists.
