Anonymizing Property Crime using FME

The City of Nanaimo wanted to provide the public with up-to-date property crime information that would be displayed on their web map. However, the data had to be anonymized for privacy reasons before it could be released. This presentation will describe how the RCMP Geomatics unit used FME Desktop to create a workspace that extracts and anonymizes the Nanaimo property crime records from a Province wide dataset in less than a minute. The anonymization process includes changing the address number to show only the hundred block and remapping the property crime points to the middle of the street block. Not only does it do the work very quickly, but all the attributes are consistent with every delivery. After our workspace is run, the file geodatabase of the anonymized property records in Nanaimo is then forwarded back to the analyst and then onto the City of Nanaimo for display in their web map. Attendees will walk away with ideas and best practises for using FME to anonymize data so they can apply the same time savings to other data generalization tasks.