Case Study: Maritime and Coastguard Agency achieves faster, more accurate incident pinpointing with Ordnance Survey's FINTAN

Maritime and Coastguard Agency - Customer Case Study

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), through HM Coastguard, is responsible for coordinating civilian maritime search and rescue across the UK and faces the challenge of quickly locating incidents when callers use local nicknames or non-gazetteer place names. Ordnance Survey supplied the FINTAN vernacular gazetteer solution—built on OS data including the 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer, 1:25 000 Scale Colour Raster and OS MasterMap Address Layer 2—to capture, store and display the local names people use so responders can pinpoint incident locations faster.

Ordnance Survey implemented FINTAN as a searchable, crowd-sourced portal that lets MCA staff add and find local names alongside grid, latitude and longitude references, creating a common geography for emergency services. The deployment across MCA’s MRCCs has made it quicker to locate beaches, rocks and other features (MCA responded to over 15,000 coastal incidents in 2010), with users reporting a significant reduction in time to find places and improved coordination for rescues — all achieved with no additional investment.

Maritime and Coastguard Agency

Mark Harrington

Staff Officer for Vessel Traffic Monitoring