Features Made Easy

Brent Porter Java, GIS/SDE and Interface programmer

Outline

  Introduction   Domain Problem Breakdown   Solution   Detailed Discussion   Demo!

Introduction

  Brent Porter   Java, GIS/SDE and Interface Programmer at TCEQ   Masters degree, Geography & Oceanography specializations   “Lots” of ESRI experience

  12 years with ArcGIS   10 Years with ArcIMS   6 years with ArcSDE   4 years with ArcGIS Server

  First started working with FME Spatial Direct in 2003-2004. Installed FME Server at TCEQ in early 2009.

  11 years experience with Java & Javascript   Sun/Oracle Certified Programmer   4 years experience with C Sharp

Outline

  Introduction   Domain Problem Breakdown   Solution   Detailed Discussion   Demo!

Domain Problem

  Water Utility District (WUD) Spatial Viewer   WUD program at TCEQ handles requests for data

about Water Utility Districts.

  Districts digitized off of old paper maps originally or handed down in a semi secret ritual. :)

  Data was shared on a large file server and individual copies were created by each analyst that needed to edit, create or amend the data.

  New data was also manually reconciled when discrepancies occurred between different editors.

Domain Problem – cont.

  Water Utility District (WUD) Spatial Viewer   Data requests required the team to extract out

the area of interest, manually.

  If the data type was an available export format, the staff would manually translate the data into the new format.

  This manual process wasn't speedy. Although it satisfied the mandate of the team, it was not providing the best return on investment for the effort. Not only were the data updates and new data creation being done in a silo, but only a manual process was available for extracting the data.

Domain Problem – cont.

  Water Utility District (WUD) Spatial Viewer   Just for fun – the spatial viewer needed to

integrate with a legacy web application that displayed non spatial data in a typical/traditional form view.

Outline

  Introduction   Domain Problem Breakdown   Solution   Detailed Discussion   Demo!

Solution

  Water Utility District (WUD) Spatial Viewer   The solution consisted of a complete rework of

the entire business process for creating, editing and warehousing of the WUD data.

Solution – cont.

  At the end of the process, to achieve success we would do several things:   #1- On the persistence tier, we would be

providing a centralized, versioned geodatabase through which multiple clients, both desktop and web based would be able to access the most timely data possible.

  #2- At the business tier we would be integrating the spatial viewer into the traditional legacy web application through a 'loose-coupling' process.

Solution – cont.

  Success Benchmarks, continued   #3 - At the presentation tier we would be

actually creating a set of self service processes which would completely remove the need to contact WUD team members except in cases of errors or exceptional items.

  In conjunction with this final goal, the application needed to:   Print cartographic quality products   Export data from one of four spatially defined

units and into one of three spatial formats

Outline

  Introduction   Domain Problem Breakdown   Solution   Detailed Discussion   Demo!

Detailed Discussion

  In the details…   For the extract services we needed to provide

access to each of the different extract formats for the self service data store.

  FME Desktop Workbench and Visualizer were used to create the processes that were then uploaded to FME Server 2009.

Detailed Discussion

  In the details… •  To create the extraction, we needed data for

spatial 'cookie-cutters'

•  We chose several ‘base’ or core layers

•  City, State and County boundaries Layers, preloaded into ArcSDE and Oracle as our spatial for clipping the WUD layers (4 different layers).

Detailed Discussion – cont.

  In the details…   We also needed a fourth spatial layer - a

dynamic rectangle based on the extent of the map 'window' in the map application.

  The presentation tier for this application was a custom ajax-based ArcIMS application, using javascript extensively. By using a proxy pattern, I created a java application with a Java Servlet for handling http requests. Then by capturing the user requirements for their custom data extraction (city or county, map view, etc. and download format) we could post or get the results to the servlet.

Detailed Discussion – cont.

  In the details…   A JSON Emitter module that would take the

extent values from the HTTP requests and generate JSON that would be used as a data source for FME Server for clipping the WUD datasets.

Detailed Discussion – cont.

Detailed Discussion – cont.

Outline

  Introduction   Domain Problem Breakdown   Solution   Detailed Discussion   Demo!

Demo

  Demo   WUD Spatial Viewer

Summary

  WUD Spatial Application was first deployed in November of 2008   Phase 2 which enabled the spatial ETL functions

with FME Server were deployed June 2009   The number of calls to the WUD program has

decreased dramatically   The data, now centralized has begun to be

integrated with other areas who need timely access to WUD data

  All of the stakeholders have declared it a success!

Thank You!

  Questions?

  For more information:   Brent Porter – brent@c4geo.com   Texas Commission on Environmental Quality