Setting a default mapping city

Introduction

As described in understanding mapping, part of our process to map an alert is to decide in which city or town the alert is located. This is because we have to geolocate your alert, which means converting your alert address into latitude and longitude coordinates. If your dispatch specifies a city name, we don't have to guess. Otherwise, we will usually try using your county name or the name of the city in which you are located.

What to do

If your dispatch sends a city name along with the address, or if mapping is working well already, you do not need to do anything. Additionally, there is no point in entering your county name since we already use that as the default in most cases.

If your dispatch does not send a city along with the address and you want to manually override our city determination process, you may specify a city manually from your Active911 account. If Google is unable to find the address in the indicated default city, Google may replace the default city with a suggested city.

Log into your Active911 account and click on the Agency tab. Scroll to the bottom. Simply enter a city name in the Default City for Mapping field. Do NOT enter a state or province name. If the option is grayed out or disabled, your account does not have the Edit Agency permissions - you'll need to contact an admin and get this permission added.

Notes

• If you specify an incorrect city name, mapping will no longer work!

• If our geocoding process finds the address to be in a different city than the default you specified here, we will update the city name for that alert

• If your dispatch specifies a GPS latitude and longitude instead of an address, we will skip this step and map the GPS location directly.