AM/FM/GIS makes a 180-Degree turn

AM/FM/GIS makes a 180-Degree turn

David M Glenn
Senior Technical Manager
Intergraph Corporation
Huntsville, Al

Introduction
Forward thinking corporations have long understood the potential value of adding the geospatial dimension to their corporate data. The ability to provide, organize, and display data geographically gives immediate insight into many difficult problems companies face. Appropriate distribution of plant to provide services, dispatching to repair faults, forecasting where growth will occur and planning to meet the demands and opportunities of that growth are just some of the areas where geographic information is invaluable. With the increasing pressure among utility companies to compete for new business based on the ability to add new services quickly and respond to customer requests and complaints, the advantage of an accurate and responsive geospatial database is hard to underestimate.

Enterprose Geographics
The highest value to be gained in adding geospatial data to the corporation is found when the geographic data can be added in to the corporate database directly. There it is accessible to the entire enterprise, providing value not only to engineering, but to finance, work management, marketing and corporate planning. Given the obvious value of having geospatial data about the corporate assets in the corporate database, why are so many GIS solutions at best only located in the engineering department, on isolated proprietary systems? Why do so many attempts at bringing GIS into the enterprise fail to deliver the promised payback, or worse, fail to reach full production status at all?

Until recently even the successful implementors of GIS have relied on proprietary solutions for providing the geospatial analysis and management of the geometry. The great hope of bringing the geospatial characteristics of the corporate data into the enterprise were not being realized, since accessing spatial data required not only specialized processors, but access to separate data management systems. The geometry itself and its relationships were difficult if not impossible to represent in the standard corporate relational database.

Advances in Relational Support for Geographics
With the introduction of spatial data handling in the latest relational ware, Oracle SDO for example, geometry can be stored and accessed in well-defined manners in the relational database. Further, database access languages have been and are being extended to allow the use of spatial operators in querying the geometry. Yet, as one looks at the various GIS offerings, one sees that vendors of GIS software are still making proprietary secondary stores of geometry and geometry-related data a fundamental part of their architecture. Do they not understand the need to bring geospatial data access to the whole of the enterprise?

Moving the geographics into the corporate database is more than a matter of just creating geometry data types and inserting them into the database as records in the corporate database tables. Certainly this makes the data integrity and data management issues an IT problem which is a good thing, and it makes the data available for any enterprise database processor to access. Additionally, bringing the geographic data and its associated attributes into the corporate database allows the full power of the corporate database software to be applied, software like stored procedures, triggers, and use of standard database reporting software.

However, GIS applications did not go to proprietary data storage solutions arbitrarily. A prime driver for this approach in the past was the need for graphics processing performance that allowed the user to browse across thousands of Geographic records quickly, viewing this data as rendered vectors on a graphics screen, with high resolution of detail, symbolized according to the attribute data associated to the Geographic feature. In addition, GIS applications needed to do geographically-based locates and queries, and 'feature-based' editing, where the geometry needed to be handled in concert with all associated data for a geographic feature. Enterprise database technology did not support this kind of performance or functionality. Even today, relational database retrieval speeds for geometry are not fast enough to support the random map data access that all successfuul GIS applications provide. However, the relational vendors continue to make progress, as is seen in the addition of spatial indices and spatial operators which take advantage of these indices for faster geometry retrieval. Measurements vary, but relational database are beginning to support retrieval speeds of up to 1000 simple geometries per second. This has enabled some non-GIS applications to gain access to enterprise geometric data. Even with this, the performance demands placed on GIS applications are still not met by today's mainstream corporate databases. Most mainstream geographic applications need 5 to 10 times this retrieval rate in order to provide the map display users have come to expect. This retrieval rate needs to include the time required to compute symbology as well, as most users expect the current display of the geographics to correctly reflect any attribute changes made that affect the appearance of the geometry. (E.G., changing symbols as the type of the transformer is changed, or color as the state of the equipment is moved from 'proposed' to 'in-service'.)

Graphics Acceleration
Thus, most vendors are still placing proprietary, heavily optimized databases between the corporate user and the corporate database for the access of geospatial data. This frequently is little more than a satellite copy of the corporate data including geometry and attribute information related to the geometry, organized for high speed spatial access. Interfacing this GeoSpatial database with the corporate database is usually some variation of the check out and check in approach of old for copying geometry data to the performant format, then posting it back to the corporate database. This led to obvious difficulties in synchronization, maintenance of referential integrity, and even in general database maintenance since the corporate data management schemes do not cover the proprietary copy. This also makes it difficult for corporate users to see proposed or in progress work since these geometry edits are done in the ‘copy’ and are not available to the corporate data base user.

So what is the interim solution as we wait for faster and faster hardware, higher speed relational databases, optimized for spatial data access, yet preserving the stability of corporate data base management?

One approach to the problem is to provide a graphics accelerator. Not a satellite copy of the Database with all the inherent data integrity problems, but a 'dynamic cache', if you will. A cache which accelerates graphics performance by organizing the Geographic and symbology-important attributes spatially so that data retrieval and symbolization decisions can be executed at high speeds. This cache must be able to be quickly and easily refreshed as database changes occur so that there is never a question that the user is seeing an accurate view of the corporate data. Further, the GeoSpatial applications must only use the accelerator to access the data quickly, not for updates. Updates must be done to the corporate database and reflected quickly to the graphics cache. To support this kind of refresh, there must be some form of modification tracking and event broadcasting between the database and the application. Databases can easily be set to perform modification tracking, and with some careful thought, the geometry cache can be set to be updated based on periodic or prompted inspection of the database modifications. With this approach the data always resides it its most up to date form in the corporate database, is managed along with the rest of the corporate data in a single data processing environment and is always available to other corporate database processors. Additionally, the application can achieve very high performance for graphics viewing using sophisticated spatial retrieval techniques against a spatially indexed cache. Such graphics accelerators along with the complex database delta management required to keep graphics caches from becoming stale are beginning to appear on the market. The movement of Geographics into the mainstream corporate database along with the provision of Geographics accelerators that allow the complex GIS applications to still meet their performance requirements, are the innovations which enable the GIS world to become a first-class corporate citizen and geographic data to become a first-class corporate asset.

Enterprise-Wide benefits
Geographics is no longer limited to an isolated segment of the enterprise. Database-driven graphics reverses the role of the geofacilities model. The original intent of geospatial facility management systems was to support the prevailing mapping functions and produce a geographic facilities model capable of interfacing with other corporate systems. The primary users of this technology have been the historic users of maps and drawings and the technology did not achieve its potential. Today’s advancements place a new perspective on geospatial presentation and analysis. With the old graphics-driven database approach users had to draw a picture or a map to view one and the results were always very similar to the original. By contrast, the new database-driven graphics approach establishes the geofacilities model as a corporate database capable of true integration with other enterprise-wide systems and applications. Here geographics are an expression of the geofacilities model and equally as important expressions of data held in other corporate databases previously unavailable for integration. Graphics have long been known for their ability to communicate complex information and improve accuracy and efficiency. With this new technology corporations can now reevaluate the use of graphics across the entire enterprise not just the functions where mapping was historically used.

Service Analysis and Marketing
One of the strengths of GIS has been the ability to perform spatial analysis on data from external sources such as demographic data with the geofacilities model. The new approach greatly broadens the horizon of possibilities. Data from other corporate systems can be associated with the facilities model to perform customer retention studies, plant to revenue studies, service expansion studies, and assist with the evaluation of new service requests.

Operations and Maintenance
The majority of operations and maintenance work is performed based on facilities performance history, regulator’s inspection criteria and failure analysis. Much of this information is maintained in asset management and other system previously not geospatially enabled or integrated with the geofacilities model. Efficiencies will be realized by integrating this data and producing database driven graphics and reports.

Design and Change Management
Over the past 10 years this area has received the greatest concentration of development for providing database capabilities designed to manage the geofacilities model. A radical change form proprietary databases to open commercially available spatial databases will revolutionize the design process, the integration with engineering calculations, work management, and the management of the geofacilities model. The open approach will create greater competition for open products thus reducing a dependency on proprietary programming languages and producing higher levels of efficiencies in both programming and end user applications.

Enterprise Access, View and Update
The greatest advantage of the technology is to be realized in the widespread use of geographics across the enterprise. Fast and accurate displays of land and complex geofacilities models provide efficient presentation of information from integrated corporate databases. These pictures then provide excellent database mining tools for more detailed investigation and reporting. With new web access into this integrated environment this will be an explosive area for expansion and benefit achievement.

Trouble Reporting, Outage Management and Computer Aided Dispatch
A very hot application areas as performance-based revenue models emerge. These are mission critical applications that require extensive integration with both systems and technologies. They place high performance demands on graphics and database access. Efficiencies realized with these applications drive directly to the bottom-line of the corporation.

Summary
New technology has been introduced into the mainstream database technology that now allows Geographics to be stored in the database and accessed through spatial indices. The movement of Geographics into the mainstream corporate database along with the provision of Geographics accelerators that allow the complex GIS applications to still meet their performance requirements are the innovations which move Geographic processing into mainstream IT and enable the GIS world to become a first-class corporate asset.