Enhancing Geodata Display for the Enterprise
Maurice Wildgen
Byers Engineering Company SpatialAge Solutions Divisions
6285 Barfield Road Atlanta, GA 30328
Abstract
Benefits of spatial views of network assets are not restricted to engineering users. As enterprise
data repositories become spatially enabled, the need arises for more robust geodata display
capability allowing sales and marketing, customer service, installation and repair, provisioning,
one-call, as well as engineering personnel to more effectively participate in service fulfillment
and assurance processes.
In the not too distant future, broadband content will lead all revenue sources enabled by
communications networks. Operational Support System (OSS) product vendors and service
providers understand next-generation OSSs must enable the creation of new business products,
while network infrastructure plays a supporting role. Good marketing to spur demand, is only
successful if it can deliver what it promises. Knowledge of network infrastructure and
corresponding customer connectivity is the basis for effective service fulfillment and assurance
in a competitive environment.
With enhanced geodata display capability, users can select, display, report, and subsequently
analyze aspects of their facilities infrastructure by combining it with data from external sources.
Sharing facility data can allow views superimposed on image data, demographics, customer
location, street network, and boundary data thereby supporting efficient management of
customer connectivity contributing to low cost, high quality of service.
Overview
This paper presents a description of a geodata viewing and reporting product (GeoData Display)
that is intended to provide utility industry users read-only access to spatial and tabular facilities
data in a spatially enabled database. In general, the purpose of a such a geo-display product is to
provide a variety of methods, techniques, and approaches for the user to explore and analyze
their geo-referenced data.
Users can select, display, report, and subsequently analyze aspects of their facilities
infrastructure by combining it with external data sources. For example, views of facilities
superimposed on image data, demographics, customer location, street network, and boundary
data can support trouble management, dispatching, maintenance & repair, Continuing Property
Reporting (CPR), and CBUD (Call Before You Dig) activities.
The full featured GeoData Display tool would support external data combined with spatially
enabled facility data by accessing other data sources over the enterprise information bus. In this
manner operational data, customer records, trouble reports, utilization data, and demographic
data can be merged allowing unprecedented views of the current (or historical) state of the
business (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Geodata Display Product
The term "spatial analysis" encompasses a wide range of techniques for analyzing, visualizing,
simplifying, and theorizing about spatially-enabled data. Methods of spatial analysis can be as
simple as taking measurements from a map or as sophisticated as the most abstract forms of
mathematical statistics.
Our ability to extract meaning from, and make useful decisions in a timely manner has not kept
pace with ever increasing amounts of data. By summarizing, generalizing, and abstracting large
volumes of data, we can create more effective visualizations of data in order to find patterns for
testing theories and hypotheses, and for making critical business decisions.
The solution shown in Figure 1 can help solve both the internal and the external management
issues around Operational Support System (OSS) interconnection. It can bridge the gap between
legacy to legacy connectivity, as well as the additional mix of vendor and homegrown
proprietary solutions.
Core business drivers are the vital forces behind the deployment of such an implementation.
These drivers include:
- The need to make the service provider network more reliable and reactive improving
quality of service.
- Providing customers with services faster than their previous capabilities and their
competitors.
- Enabling the delivery of new and innovative services and service bundles.
- Finding and repairing faults faster ensuring higher reliability of the network.
- Selectively providing wholesale information to Competitive Local Exchange Companies
(CLECs), protecting successful business processes.
Service providers desperately need the this type of solutions now. Issues such as scalability and
extensibility need to be addressed, however The solution must be able to install in small test
markets for CLEC endeavors and scale/grow, as the business is geographically successful.
Incumbent Local Exchange Companies (ILECs) need it to scale with respect to the size of their
large legacy OSS’s and have the capability of scaling down for small remote areas in their
regions. For both ILECs and CLECs, this solution needs to have the capability to incorporate
new advanced services and service bundles with minimal adjustment to the system.
Business Opportunity
Although the business opportunity for the GeoData Display product is discussed here in term of
the telecom industry, there are similar benefits for other utility customers such as electric and gas
distribution companies.
A full featured version of the GeoData Display tool would provide benefits to large number of
users both internal and external to the company. Various types of external data sources can be
supported but in an environment where the heterogeneous aspects are mediated via an
information bus middleware environment. This will minimize the level of expertise needed to
compose the desired views.
The product would provide API "adapters" that perform data mapping and semantic translation
for inbound data items so that the registration, conflation, coordinate transformation, scaling,
symbology, and feature definition functions can happen with much less user intervention than the
intermediate release.
