Sep , 2006 v FME Worldwide User Conference - Vancouver FME at the City of Nanaimo: A Home Run Jason Birch & Tim Taylor, City of Nanaimo, BC

City of Nanaimo 2 Nanaimo  Small community of approximately 80,000 residents  Located on the east coast of Vancouver Island, approximately 50 km west of Vancouver  Strong recreational opportunities and a reasonable cost of living

City of Nanaimo 3 GIS at the City of Nanaimo  GIS functions are spread across several departments  No central authority for Geospatial information, standards, or enterprise-wide initiatives  Cooperation is achieved through consensus, but often business requirements lead to divergent solutions

City of Nanaimo 4 IT’s GIS Role  Maintains and tracks assets of all departments’ GIS software.  Develops internal and external web mapping applications.  Responsible for scheduled translations between all supported GIS formats.

City of Nanaimo 5 Engineering’s GIS Role  Corporate data management of the city’s infrastructure.  Data models  Data acquisition and maintenance  Infrastructure analysis  Cartographic output  Technical and process support for all departments without GIS capabilities.  Remotely sensed data collection and management.

City of Nanaimo 6  Planning Department uses MapInfo for traditional analysis and mapping, and ArcGIS/ArcScene for 3D analysis.  Public Works Department uses MapInfo for job planning, asset location, and video data management.  Fire Department uses MapInfo to maintain simplified map books located on fire apparatus.  Parks and Recreation uses MapInfo to generate public-facing cartographic products. Other GIS roles at the City of Nanaimo

City of Nanaimo 7 Life before FME  All corporate data was held in file-based formats such as Autodesk DWG and MapInfo TAB  There were some high-maintenance translation procedures in place, but only for a few critical data sets  Staff was spending considerable time coordinating data between departments  Base data easily became stale, increasing the risk of poor decisions, and difficulty in integrating data sets led to many undiscoverable data sources throughout the organisation  Understanding of and support for shared corporate database technology was limited

City of Nanaimo 8 Goals  The City identified three needs:  Current departmental tools and processes had to be supported to maintain operational efficiency  Data currency and efficiency of distribution needed to be addressed  Migration of existing processes into “best practices” enterprise geospatial systems had to be supported in a non-disruptive manner

City of Nanaimo 9 Approaches  Two components were identified as being required to address the organisation’s goals:  Scheduled translations: ensure that existing operations are not disrupted and, for legacy data formats, that organisation-wide data currency is improved  Enterprise spatial database(s): allow for more efficient and accessible data stores  FME was a critical component for the implementation of both of these strategies.

City of Nanaimo 10 Scheduled Translations  Costs  Initial software acquisition and maintenance  Process development and maintenance  Continued reliance on file system for integrity and security  Benefits  Data update cycle lowered to one day (or as changed)  Existing users and applications not disrupted  Easier to achieve buy-in for a low-cost solution with clear potential to reduce ongoing costs  Allows quick switch from using legacy data store as source format to using an enterprise database, enabling a phased database access strategy

City of Nanaimo 11 Enterprise Spatial Database  Costs  Initial purchase and maintenance fees for new software and hardware  Internal training or consulting for implementation and maintenance  Migration of existing applications  End user training to access and update the new data source  Benefits  One source for data update and retrieval  Immediate change visibility  Data integrity  Granular permissions

City of Nanaimo 12 Example Scheduled Translation Project  Existing process:  Three person-days per month in cleaning, building, and translating the data out into MapInfo  Impossible to ensure consistency between translations  Unreliable custom scripts used to refactor the layers for MapGuide, extracting items like centroids into external tables  Resources Required:  Safe Software FME Professional Edition  Enough knowledge of FME to replicate existing manual and automated procedures  Scheduling system to automate the process

City of Nanaimo 13 Scheduled Translation Results  Seamless replacement of manual procedures with automated ones  Currency of data greatly improved  Positive return in approximately six months. Cost less than $5000 for a staff savings of $10,000 for the initial project alone, with additional processes having minimal incremental cost

City of Nanaimo 14 Example Enterprise Database Project  FME was initially used to assist in the population of a corporate Oracle based spatial asset management system from the city’s existing cad structure and related datasets  The migration to this corporate database was achieved through the use of staged translations of data, avoiding disruption of existing processes  As the enterprise wide dataset continues to evolve, FME is used to ease the transition from departmental silos of information into a shared environment

City of Nanaimo 15 Update Process Example “Fire Flow Testing” Enabling the integration of information in a corporate sense – through scheduled translations Enabling the integration of information in a corporate sense – through scheduled translations

City of Nanaimo 16 Enterprise Update Integration

City of Nanaimo 17 Opportunistic Use  Although none if these effects were expected when implementing FME, we have enjoyed them nonetheless:  Easy publishing of data to Google Earth  Substantial efficiencies in ad-hoc projects such as reconciliation of data with neighbouring communities  Scheduled translations of data into formats suitable for public consumption  Innovative solutions, such as generating a Dispatch Run Card book from a street centerline dataset

City of Nanaimo 18 Efficiencies Gained  Preserves and enhances the traditional data delivery and access mechanisms, maintaining operational efficiencies.  Provides a platform which allows the organization to gradually move towards an integrated spatial management environment  Reduces the number of specialized software packages required to perform detailed spatial analysis and create traditionally accepted reports

City of Nanaimo 19 Experience  FME was easy to learn, quick to implement, and provided transformative capabilities far beyond translation  FME allowed us to easily work around weaknesses in current enterprise databases schemes, such as multi-platform editing and text/symbol representation  This process encouraged better inter-departmental communications, improving project collaborations and increasing organisational efficiency

City of Nanaimo 20 Questions? Tim Taylor and Jason Birch City of Nanaimo