Semantic data definition
With so many systems of different vendors or in-house solutions, the semantic data
problem is one of the biggest problems to have a real integrated enterprise-wide
solution. Usually systems that were built for different purposes have different
views of the data. This semantic problem has no immediate solution. A global data
model that embraces all components of the whole IT architecture solution will be
necessary.
Another problem related to the semantic of the data for a given area is the
definition of the master database for each area. This decision is hard to be take
because it involves technical and non-technical issues.
Data Conversion
The data gathering and conversion process is well known to be the most time and
cost consuming in a GIS startup projects. This is the case mainly in developing
and continental countries, such as Brazil. Good digital maps are very rare, they
are usually very expensive and in most cases have to be done from the beginning
because of the poor quality of the sources. In order to break this barrier it is
necessary to identify the need of data based on process mapping, i.e., to start
building the maps with only the necessary data and enhance the maps along the
usage of the system with the field crews, for example. This approach is very useful
for CLEC startup process. It reduces the time and costs to start the operations.
The SAGRE solution for this problem is to classify the land base types by the
accuracy and amount of data for each type. Each land base type has its purpose
and is appropriate for some module of SAGRE. The description of each land base
type, on a incremental degree, is shown as follow:
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Land Base 1 – City limits and Urban area limits
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Land Base 2 – Center lines, Districts, Street Names
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Land Base 3 – Blocks, Address ranges and Zip codes
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Land Base 4 – Lot boundaries and Addresses
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Land Base 5 –Address profiles (consumer class, etc)
There are also a number of elements that are optional such as limits of
administrative areas, counties, state and country, and other features such as curb,
hydrography, roads, railways, etc. These elements are not always necessary for a
Network Management applications but can be useful.
Scalability
In order to fit the requirements of a competitive market, systems must be capable
of running on different hardware architectures of different vendors (mainly for Unix
environment).
The scalability is not a matter of appropriate sizing of server machines. Modern
applications need to have the ability to either do a load balancing by using
powerful clients or use a web based approach to be able to spread the process
throughout the application servers. This is called a three or N-tier architecture.
Geospatial applications have other problems mainly because of the large amount
of data and also the complexity of the spatial data structures. The best approach
to deal with this problem is to split the maps, i.e., databases, into operational areas
such as: central office area, cities, states, operational divisions. This approach will
solve performance issues. However, in an enterprise solution several other issues
may arise that should be solved at application level. Examples of these problems
are objects that pass through two or more areas like trunk cables or microwave
links or some business process that involve objects of two or more different areas
like customer address change from one city to another.
