Complex, Intelligent Landbases: Essential for Enterprise Geo-Spatial Solutions
These are significant tasks and must be addressed if an EGIS initiative is going to be successful. Furthermore, the complexity and cost of these tasks is more often than not aggravated by the fact that the developers and operators of most currently installed AM/FM and GIS systems took an insular approach to system development and therefore paid minimal attention to these issues. Instead they spent as little time and money as possible on building a land model to satisfy their relatively narrow suite of applications and did not concern themselves with the significant limitations that this approach would impose from an EGIS perspective. As a result of these decisions (which due to technology limitations at the time, were not necessarily unreasonable), the people who have now been given the responsibility to build the “ultimate Enterprise GIS” (often the same people) are faced with a significant challenge to retroactively correct former shortsightedness.
The Enterprise Landbase Concept
The foundation of any successful Enterprise GIS is an Enterprise landbase (ELB) - a single digital landbase that contains all of the gee-spatial features and topology necessary to satisfy the fill spectrum of Enterprise AM/FM/GIS applications. The concept is simple. However, a needs analysis will quickly reveal the broad spectrum of gee-spatial data and data relationships (topology) that must be modeled and constructed in order to satis~ the full spectrum of EGIS applications.
All of the necessary gee-spatial data richness cannot be secured from a single digital map source. There is no choice therefore but to search for other data sources (both internal and external) and look for ways to integrate these disparate sources into one homogeneous landbase. Also, vector data alone will not satisfy all corporate stakeholder expectations and application needs. Rasters in the form of digital orthophotos and satellite imagery have become extremely popular for a number of utility GIS applications and are therefore an essential component of any ELB. Finally,an ELB comprised of 2-D data only will severely constrain the functionality and utility of an Enterprise GIS. It is essential therefore that ELB planners and developers accept the fact that the world truly is a 3-D place and design their landbases accordingly.
|
