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Landbase Maintenance What the future holds
Jay Clark
Geographic Data Technology, Inc.
11 Lafayette Street
Lebanon, NH 03766
Jay Clark
Geographic Data Technology, Inc.
11 Lafayette Street
Lebanon, NH 03766
The evolution of landbase mapping began with manual survey techniques. Traditional thinking about landbases led to an assumption that they were static things, similar to property surveys. For example, a crew could measure a service territory or, better yet, get property surveys from local governments and keep them as reams of map sheets. These sheets could then be duplicated and referred to in relation to the engineering infrastructure, also carefully measured and drawn on paper.
In this mindset, landbase maintenance would be primarily motivated by changes in the infrastructure. Unfortunately, an area the size of Dallas or Los Angeles would require a small army of draftsmen to maintain.
Enter the CAD revolution.
With CDA systems, revisions could be made much more quickly, shrinking the drafting pool, and making information-recall considerably quicker. Maintenance procedures would still be driven by infrastructure changes. And data distribution would still be primarily paper-based. Indeed, all assumptions behind CAD technology were still "paper based". In CAD systems, for example:
- It's annotations, not attributes; street names are stored as text objects separate from line work.
- Electronic storage and editing technology is only for preparing map sheets; data is viewed on paper and analysis is done from paper. Landbase data is principally for the use of the engineering group; the data collection effort is leveraged only minimally for the rest of the enterprise.
Through the efforts of GDT's Don Cooke and others at Harvard Labs in the late 1960's, the GIS revolution was born. This approach to electronic data storage defined the model below:
Now we are able to assign many and varied attributes to the two nodes and the line segment above, including elevation, feature names, addresses, feature class codes, arterial classification codes, and anything else that the imagination offers.
With the development of GIS technology, the maintenance of the landbase diverged from strictly a utilities infrastructure issue to an end in itself.
The United States Bureau of the Census made the concept of a nationwide landbase a reality. Readily available and affordable, TIGER® data has provided a starting point for many thousands of mapping projects. This data, available in the public domain, has been the backbone of many an initial landbase development project.
Recognizing a lucrative market, many private companies have entered into the GIS data market. Concurrent with the data market, software companies have proliferated. In today's market there are several companies competing for the attention of the utilities industry, all claiming to have the most powerful, useful software products available.
The "bleeding edge" software implementation is the relational database. Proven technologies for object-oriented data storage, retrieval and editing are moving to the RDBMS.
Hardware development has made computing power available that can manage data in ways few people predicted 5 years ago. Some Examples
- Near real-time updates of nationwide service territories. Multiple sources can create "multiple simultaneous realities"
- Real World modeling is possible with remote sensing. Georeferenced orthophotographic data is reliable and affordable.
- Communication technology is getting better, too. Wireless protocols will make near real-time field data accessible.
The answer to all these questions can be found in the landbase, if it's current, accurate, and detailed.
The job of collecting, compiling and updating data for an area the size of Texas or California (not to mention the Unites States or the Western Hemisphere) is huge. There are efficiencies of scale to be gained by forming partnerships in data sharing. These efficiencies will only be realized when a company is willing to make a major investment in technology and resources specifically dedicated to the care and feeding of a high quality landbase.
From a financial perspective, most utilities will not want to sidetrack resources to do the kind of proactive landbase maintenance required for information in today's marketplace. In a typical month my own company, GDT, makes millions of edits across the four nations that we maintain. These edits are made based on inputs from thousands of sources. The staffs collecting information and making edits number in the hundreds. No utility will be willing to make the investment required to do this and still remain profitable.
In today's rapidly changing world, the idea that we can spend $15 - 20 per mile to create a landbase, and that when it is "done", we can use it without a planned maintenance effort that proactively searches for changes & new features, is just not functional.
By partnering with a landbase data specialist, the per-mile cost can be reduced by a factor of 10. In addition to cost-savings is the access to local knowledge that would be unknown to the typical single-source utility landbase developer.
None of us has a crystal ball for predicting the future. Based on our analysis of present conditions in the GIS data market, it's a sure thing that partnering with a data compilation specialist is the way to a winning landbase strategy.