Taking your enterprise AM/FM/GIS on the road
Peter Scheffler
Applications Product Manager
Enghouse Systems Limited
80 Tiverton Court, Suite 800
Markham, Ontario L3R OG4 Canada
Maturing Computer Users in Your Corporation
The increasing awareness of computing technology and the recent explosion of interest in the Intemet and
distributed computing has had a positive effect on computer process implementations over the past several years.
With the masses learning how to use increasingly more powerful and smaller computer systems, the information age
has begun to move out of the centralized and sterilized environments of the 'computer rooms' and
engineering/design groups and out into the corporations' user base. For most database types, this has meant the
increased use of client/server technology and multi-tiered development environments to meet this growing need.
In the world of AMIFMIGIS, this has tended to mean a double edged sword answer to getting the corporation using
the data stored in your Spatial Database'.
On the one hand the data stored within your Spatial Database tends to contain many times the information stored
within other database formats and the inter-relationships and special data types tend to be cumbersome when
replicated or referenced from many different locations throughout the enterprise. Still, users wish to be able to
'browse' information stored within the database, refer to digital maps and perform timely queries against this data
On the other hand, from the AM/FM/GIS Project Manager's perspective, this means that not only does the project
get the all important 'corporate exposure' forever needed to continue receiving funding (especially in today's
increasingly competitive environment) but with users performing their own 'data mining,' your staff becomes
available to do more and more data refining and data collection.
What are our options?
With today's ever advancing technology, there are many different options available to the enterprising AM/FM/GIS
project manager to get data out to 'the masses.' These options range in their technical complexity, data concurrency,
cost to implement and maintain and what the application requirements are at the end user side. We'll begin by
looking at these options in detail.
Listed in the matrix below is a generalization of the groups of options available with today's technology.
The options listed here are the broad brush groups available to us, as implementers of the system. The actual
implementation of each of these, I will discuss below.
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Disk Image Replication
What this essentially implies, given today's technology is the use of CD-ROM and other write-once-read-many
(WORM) technology. With the advent of new technology, such as Digital Video Disks (DVD) there maybe
changes in how these are implemented. But cumently these technologies are in their infancy and require some time
to be proven.
Using this media allows for the creation of a series of 'CD-Sets'that mimic the old method of generating plots and
micro-fiche. This technology has several unique and compelling reasons for its use.
Firstly, the cost is typically the easiest to bear in the initial stages of an implementation. The cost of CD-ROM write
hardware or "CD-ROM writer" is currently in the $500US range, with the media price going as low as only a few
dollars per CD. This puts the creation of the media on par with the existing processes that most likely already exist
within the records management departments of your organization.
The second reason for this implementation, especially early in a project is the 'don't-rock-the-boat' scenario. Most
companies will, in their manual process flow generate a series of drawings and/or paper records on a fairly regular
basis. This cycle varies based on the data displayed and by whom it is used. The drafting department or records
management groups make this information already and the change to 'burning CDs' is a logical extension for both
themselves and the data consumers. The import consumers of the information then can be at ease with the process
and gain an understanding of what the AM/FM/GIS is actually doing for them.
The down side of this type of process however is more a long term issue, when the number of CDs within your
organization can become unwieldy. Quickly, the issue of which CD is the latest version becomes a problem, which
are usually resolved through semi-manual processes. The cause of this is that the issue of a new CD-ROM is the
data within your Spatial Database is forever changing and evolving. And, since that typically these changes are
small in comparison to the total volume of information stored therein, you end up re-writing much more information
that is really needed. If, for example one CD-ROM contained several central offices or pressure districts, then when
one is outdated. the entire CD-ROM needs to be rewritten.
The end-user application requirements for this type of replication depends mainly on the technical competence of
the user and their business needs. Typically, users have used Viewer technology, small footprint applications
allowing querying, plotting and reporting functionality on a desktop/laptop andlor palmtop PC. With the advent of
the CD-ROM replication process, users can then be located outside of the normal local area network (LAN) or wide
area network (WAN) environment.
This, therefore leads into the next level of replication, which tends to be on-line access to a Spatial Database server.
1Spatial Database is defined as a mixture of both graphic information for determining an item's geographic or
schematic location and meta or attribute data stored in an enterprise available database.
