Effective Integration of Field Inventory and Data Conversion Efforts

Introduction
An increasingly competitive environment in the utility industry has been brought about by impending deregulation and the many associated consolidations and mergers. This changing environment has ushered in the increased need for a more modern, accurate and economical means of capturing, storing, accessing and manipulating critical facility data. Depending on the availability and accuracy of existing sources, utilities will be faced with the decision of using traditional methods to convert existing sources, or capture the data in the field. While intelligent and highly persuasive arguments can be made for both approaches, the best balance of accuracy and economy can often be found in the effective integration of field inventory and traditional conversion methodologies.

Historical Perspective
In the past, there was little integration between the field data capture and the conversion processes. Manual data acquisition in the field and digital conversion of existing sources were largely separate activities, and the use of different media to record the same information frequently introduced numerous redundant operations. Prior to the advent of digital field data acquisition systems, the primary means of data capture in the field consisted of manually recording attribute information onto paper forms and hand drawing the facilities.

The paper data was then delivered to the conversion team to be digitized into the target GIS platform. The process of digitizing the information captured in the field, however, was complicated by several issues. Even with exhaustive QA/QC procedures in the field, paper maps were often difficult to read. Congestion of facilities in urban areas made hand drawing facilities very challenging. Legibility of field maps was further complicated by the inability to change the scale of the source map and the susceptibility of the paper to weather and other unfavorable environmental conditions. A secondary scrub process was necessary to combine attribute data captured on forms with the mapped facility information. Not only did the digitizer need to accurately interpret the mapped facilities, he/she had to interpret many styles of penmanship and different interpretations of the “correct” way to draft symbols on a map.

In addition to complications and inaccuracies caused by many people handling and interpreting the data prior to it being loaded to the GIS platform, the inefficiency of redundant operations had to be addressed. Because the data was first captured on paper and then input to a computer, the work effort for tasks such as creating ties between data and graphics, placing utility features relative to the landbase, and symbol and text placement was duplicated. Integrating a digital field data acquisition system with advanced data conversion processes eliminates much of this redundancy and the need for the data to be touched or interpreted excessively.