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It's A Brave New World
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Building an Enterprise-Wide Spatial Information Intergration Platform
David Barron
O.L.S.
Manager Technical Data Centre
Facilities Engineering
Greater Toronto Airports Authority
Lester B. Pearson International Airport
3111 Convair Drive
Toronto, Ontario CANADA L5P 1B2
Telephone: (905) 676-7747
Fax: (905) 676-4640
Email: d_barron@gtaa.com
George Irwin
P.Eng, MCP
President
Irwin Consulting Services Inc.
30 Ridley Crescent
Markham, Ontario CANADA L3S 3P5
Telephone: (905) 471-9294
Fax: (905) 472-4003
Email: girwin@home.com
The Holy Grail
The cup that Christ drank from at the last supper is a find that has long eluded archaeologists and fortune seekers alike. The search for the Holy Grail was arguably best dramatized in the Steven Spielberg/George Lucas epic, “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”. In the movie, both good and evil forces battled for possession of this cup, which, in the end eluded all and found its resting place forever out of their collective reach.
Visionaries in the AM/FM/GIS (henceforward referred to as GIS) world frequently found themselves led in a similarly difficult search for the Holy Grail of spatial information management, a world in which all information – spatial and attribute alike – resides in a ubiquitous, universally accessible and eminently usable transaction-based data warehouse. Just as the goal seems about to come into our reach, a new and better GIS technology emerges that, instead of bringing us closer to our goal, introduces a new chasm that must be crossed by the technologically elite of the spatial information management (GIS) community.
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