IDOT CVISN Documentation Project


 

Introduction

Background

Note: This information is also available at http://cs.uic.edu/~jhayward/CVISN.

From: http://cvisn.fmcsa.dot.gov/downdocs/cvisndocs/whitepapers/snpshtwp.doc (August 2001)

The national Safety and Fitness Electronic Records (SAFER) system and its distributed version, the state Commercial Vehicle Information Exchange Window (CVIEW) system or equivalent, manage information related to the safety and credentials of motor carriers and vehicles. The information stored in both SAFER and CVIEW today is organized into two major types of data, carrier and vehicle. The design also accommodates a driver data type for future use. These data types are called snapshots since they provide summary information that is intended to give a quick picture of the safety performance history and basic credential information. In addition, SAFER and CVIEW make available, but do not permanently store, more detailed information contained in reports. This paper discusses the SAFER/CVIEW snapshots. For CVISN Level 1, only carrier and vehicle snapshots are supported.

SAFER/CVIEW snapshots contain three general categories of information: identification/census, safety, and credential. The identification/census section of the snapshot provides identifying numbers, names, addresses and other information that establishes the identity of the carrier or vehicle. The safety information includes selected statistics related to accidents, violations and inspections, as well as safety ratings, if they exist. The credential information is equivalent to the decals and paper documents carried today on commercial vehicles. The information included in the snapshots has been undergoing a process of review and refinement over the course of two to four years; additions are still possible as new uses are identified for snapshots.

The original purpose for the SAFER/CVIEW snapshots was to support electronic screening of vehicles at commercial vehicle check stations. In one operating scenario, on approach to the check station, identification information is read from the vehicle’s transponder, and the vehicle is weighed. The identifiers are correlated with the SAFER/CVIEW snapshots; safety history, registration and authority data are checked; credentials check flags are examined, weight is checked against legal limits, and a decision made as to whether or not the vehicle should be pulled in. As the SAFER and CVIEW or equivalent systems are implemented, the value of snapshots for administrative processes becomes clear. Today, programs such as Performance and Registration Information Systems Management (PRISM) also plan to use snapshots to evaluate safety history in connection with vehicle registration.

Statement of Work

The University of Illinois at Chicago is to perform the analysis on the legacy information and network systems for the International Registration Plan (IRP) system at the office of Illinois Secretary of State (SOS), the International Fuel Tax  Agreement (IFTA) system at the Illinois Department of Revenue (DOR) and the Single State Registration System (SSRS) at the Illinois Commerce Commission (ILCC) and present each agency with the information it needs in order to design and implement the legacy system interfaces with these systems to the CVIEW.

The CVIEW data structures and snapshots are standardized and the layouts are documented on the CVISN/FMCSA web site http://cvisn.fmcsa.dot.gov/default.aspx?PageID=cview particularly in the following documents.

The XML schema definitions for SAFER transactions can be found here:
( http://cvisn.fmcsa.dot.gov/downdocs/cvisndocs/6_safer/safer_v50/SAFER_schema.zip)

The University will produce documentation that will map legacy data fields to their equivalent fields in the SAFER snapshots and provide documentation of procedures and process flows to facilitate development of the data extraction and transformation programs. Conditions and constraints surrounding the transformation of the data should be documented. These conditions may take the form of cross-field comparisons, concatenations of multiple fields or breaking apart single fields into multiple fields and/or any mathematical or date calculations necessary to format the data correctly. A trigger field or fields should be identified that will indicate a change in carrier and vehicle registration information that would invoke an upload or deletion of that record to the CVIEW system. There are separate transactions used to update SAFER data from CVIEW. Consistency between the CVIEW Legacy System Interface (LSI) import formats and these SAFER/CVIEW transaction formats is necessary for accurate and reliabile synchronization of data from the legacy systems and SAFER. There will be an initial load of legacy information with periodic uploads from the legacy systems to CVIEW.

The USDOT Motor Carrier Number is the preferred key for the CVIEW carrier snapshot (although state identifiers can be used). Each of the agencies has added the USDOT number to its records and was to update the field through the normal course of processing registrations and filings. The completeness of the cross-reference between state carrier records and the USDOT number must be documented.

Deliverables

  1. Interface design document(s) mapping IRP carrier and vehicle data maintained by the Illinois Secretary of State to SAFER carrier and vehicle snapshots.
  2. Interface design document(s) that map intrastate carrier and vehicle registration (Motor Vehicle Registration - MVR) data maintained by the Illinois Secretary of State to SAFER carrier and vehicle snapshots.
  3. Interface design document mapping IFTA carrier data maintained by the Illinois Department of Revenue to SAFER carrier snapshot.
  4. Interface design document identifying pertinent SSRS data maintained by the Illinois Commerce Commission for export to the Illinois CVIEW system. There is no corresponding snapshot for SSRS data in SAFER. The Illinois CVIEW will be expanded to accommodate SSRS data.

In addition to these interface design documents, the completeness of USDOT numbers cross referenced with state IDs for the Illinois Commerce Commission SSRS system, Illinois Department of Revenue IFTA system and Illinois Secretary of State IRP system is required.

General Mapping Rules

These rules apply to all transactions.
  1. Any special characters (&'"<>) need to get mapped to the XML equivalents.  Note: Php's htmlspecialchars does this.
  2. In addresses:
    1. At least one of the STREET_LINE addresses needs to be present.
    2. Standard States 2 character code need to be present (globalJurisdictionType)
    3. Zip codes can be between 1 and 10 characters (globalZipType)
    4. City, State, Zip codes need to be present
    5. Country names if present need to be mapped to balOptCountryType (US, CA, M, MX, P)
  3. Timestamps (date+time) need to be converted to XML format (YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS - note T is literal).

XML Creation Scripts

To further refine the documentation of this project, a script was written for each area (SSRS, IRP, MVR and IFTA) to generate the XML transactions.  In the case of IFTA, the "report" the DOR produced was processed by the script to create T0019 XML transactions.  In the other three cases, databases were set up which had the schema based on the information provided by ILCC or SOS and minimal test data populated these databases.  Scripts were then written to  create the T0020, T0021, T0022, T0023 XML transactions. The resultant XML transaction files were applied to the XCVIEW implementation of CVIEW. 

These scripts also can be used to document in a different way how the mappings could be done and could be used as the basis for constructing a CVIEW system.

Resources

In addition to the resources mentioned above, the following resources have been helpful in understanding the SAFER/CVIEW and state systems.

The primary resource center is the http://cvisn.fmcsa.dot.gov site.  The Documentation tab has almost all of the SAFER/CVIEW documentation.  The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL)   documents start in 1996 and major contributions continued to 2003.  The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center has continued the documentation of updates to the SAFER/CVIEW system.  Some of the documents are dated and the organization of the documents is not particularly intuitive.

As indicated previously, SAFER is a national database with safety and credential carrier information while CVIEW is a distributed (mostly individual state but could be groups of states) system which interacts with both the national SAFER database and legacy state systems.

CVIEW is also designed to be the querying target for state systems.

Our research indicates the diagram below, from XCVIEW 2.0 Overview Installation and Users Manual, is the best overview diagram from the state perspective of how CVIEW, SAFER and state systems interact.

xcview safer diagram

The best document for understanding the transactions between CVIEW and SAFER is SAFER v4.2 Interface Control Document (ICD) POR-02-7374 Baseline Version 1.0. This document was finalized in September 2003 and needs to be augmented with the current schema documentation Updated XML Schema for SAFER Version 5.0 (May 2006).  Both of these documents are found on the SAFER tab of the documentation area of the FMCSA site at: http://cvisn.fmcsa.dot.gov/default.aspx?PageID=safer

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