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Enterprise Resource Planning
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From GIS to Spatial Resource Planning: The Benefits of
Integration to the Customer
Dick Newell
Chairman
Smallworld
Elizabeth House
1, Chesterton High Street
Cambridge, CB4 lWR, UK
Email: Dick.Newell@Smallworld.co.uk
Introduction
That utilities and communications companies need to become competitive commercial
organisations that deliver shareholder value is now well known. That this has become a
worldwide phenomenon is also well known. Until these major business drivers became
prevalent, GIS was always going to be a Cinderella technology addressing automated
mapping and facilities management applications confined to the bounds of the mapping
department, or alternatively a small-time project-based departmental application used on
a one-off basis to solve a particular problem. The GIS vendor industry has had to go
through 2 transitions in order to meet the challenges faced by their customers in these
industries. The first transition, from digital mapping to GIS, is far advanced for a few
vendors. The second transition from GIS to something beyond GIS that we call Spatial
Resource Planning (SRP) has only just begun.
From Digital Mapping to GIS - The importance of architecture
Digital mapping systems, often based on CAD principles, or principles more appropriate
to solving gee-relational problems suffered many drawbacks when applied to the problem
of managing large continuous networks.
The shift to GIS meant the following changes of emphasis:
From tiles & layers to seamless spatial databases
From spatial feature-centred to object-centred
From procedural programming to object-orientation
From proprietary spatial formats to RDBMS
From analysis focus to modelling focus
From single user to many concurrent users
From short transactions to long transactions
From check-out to version management
From small database to enormous database
Tiles and layers fail to model a large seamless network of connected components
effectively.
Modelling a network should focus on the objects in the network. Treating spatial
attributes (features) in some way different from other object attributes misses the point.
Spatial is not special.
Object orientation is the natural way to model object behaviour. It reduces project
implementation costs and greatly reduces the risk of costly failures or project over-runs.
Beware object-oriented wrappers around defective technology - no matter how you wrap
a mackerel, it always smells like a mackerel.
The relational model is well proven. Why use a special format for spatial data?
Everything should be managed in a single seamless environment - a RDBMS.
Analysis is a small, but important, part of the problem. Systems that get the modelling
right make the analysis much easier. The gee-relational model only solves a limited set of
problems, and is not particularly appropriate for networks.
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