When two technologies converge: Supporting service restoration in the field

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When two technologies converge: Supporting service restoration in the field

Service Design System (SDS) – 1992 Release 1 / 1994 Release 2
Service Design System was a mobile geospatial computing application that allowed service designers to make connections of services to customer locations. The main geospatial system did not have a mobile software component, so a third party product was used to develop this application.

GIT data was extracted from the main GIT data base, and converted to an intermediate format. An additional conversion was required to create a map backdrop – no object attributes were translated in the initial conversion process.
A second extract process created a separate data base with separate attribute files, and indices for lookup tables – very few objects had their attributes converted.
SDS was a pen enabled application.
Hardware - Monochrome laptops with both pen and keyboard interfaces
Limited electronic storage on these units
Slow processors (Intel 80286 and 80386 processors) and expensive system memory
Data was mapsheet based.
All of the data had to be re-extracted to refresh – incremental updates were not available.
The second generation of this application gave the ability to automatically load the next map, if you panned to the edge of the existing mapsheet.
SDS did not have the ability to query all devices. Only devices that had the second extract performed on them to create separate attribute files could be queried.

Due to the slow hardware available at that time, the amount of processing time required to extract and convert data for use by the application made it difficult to deploy. Pen interface standards and scripting languages were not as well established as they are presently, and so clients did not readily adopt the pen interface. Mapsheets were in small chunks, and programs were created to automatically load the adjacent map sheet when the client panned to the edge of the display. The application was used primarily as a map-viewing tool.

Vegetation Management (VegMap) 1994 Release 1 / 1997 Release 1.4
VegMap was designed to add a geospatial component to a data collection process.

A vegetation management specialist would identify properties that had trees which endangered power lines. He would inventory the trees on the property, and file recommended remediation techniques on his laptop computer. With this data, the vegetation management specialist would obtain permission from the property owners, and use the collected data to create maps, and reports, and include them in packages for the tree trimming crews.

GIT data was extracted from the main GIT data base, and converted to an intermediate format. An additional conversion was required to create a map backdrop – no object attributes were translated in the initial conversion process.
A second extract process created a separate data base with separate attribute files, and indices for lookup tables – only power poles had their attributes converted.
Hardware – Colour laptops – Pen interface optional
Limited storage on these units
Somewhat better processors (Intel 80386 and 80486)
Data was mapsheet based.
All of the data had to be re-extracted to refresh – incremental updates were not available.

VegMap was actually a mobile geospatial program, run from within a data base program. The data collection was primarily to populate the data base program’s data base, while the existing geospatial data was used as a map backdrop. The freshly collected data was geospatial, but it was never sent back to the main GIT data base. Data extraction was still a long process, however, a common tool was developed to extract data for both SDS and VegMap. This generic extract tool would be used as the front end for many of the early mobile geospatial applications. Incremental update of the geospatial information was not possible. The system was more popular in rural areas where a mixture of public and privately held land made it difficult to tell who the owner of a property was. With the land parcels from the main geospatial data base, the map backdrops made it easier to determine property ownership.