Between the Poles

Map World Forum

I just spent a few days at the Map World Forum conference in Hyderabad.  This conference was quite different from its MapIndia predecessors for several reasons.  More of the participants were international, where in the past they was primarily Indian.  Also there was a very impressive list of international speakers as well as senior government ministers from the the Government of India, Kapil Sibal, Minister for Science, Technology, and Earth Sciences, other national governments, Dato'Seri Haji Ajmi bin Khalid, Minister of Natural Resources and Environment, Government of Malaysia, Rudolf Matindas, Head of Bakosurtanal (Indonesian National Coordinating Agency for Surveys and Mapping), and the Government of Andhra Pradesh, Y Rajsekhar Reddy, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, which is where Hyderabad is located.  Michael Jones, CTO of Google Maps/Earth, was there and is always interesting because he presents the latest statistics on Google Maps/Earth adoption, currently 200,000,000 Google Earth downloads and 10,000 mashups.  Gary Lang from Autodesk outlined why Autodesk, which had relied entirely on  a closed source model, decided to open source MapGuide Open Source, a new web mapping product that Autodesk has been developing over the past three years and which Autodesk contributed to the the OSGEO.

OSGEO India Meeting

One of the best attended sessions at the conference was a meeting of the Indian chapter of the OSGEO.  OSGEO India was one of the first regional chapters formed and looking at the number of people who came to this meeting, it is clear that there is a tremendous amount of interest in open source geospatial in India.  Professor B L Deekshatulu of the University of Hyderabad gave a very interesting inaugural address, followed by presentations by Dr P S Roy on OSGEO India's plans, Professor Rongguo Chen on OSGEO activities on China, a fascinating presentation by Mori Toru from Orkney in Japan on how Orkney has created a business based on open source geospatial, Professor Venkatesh Raghavan, Osaka City University, on the evolution of OSGEO, and myself on open standards, open source and open content.  With respect  to open content I discovered an interesting site, Freemap.in, where you can find a very detailed and free map of Mumbai.

Commercial Opportunities: Open Source Geospatial and Open Content

One of the trends that I am noticing in various parts of the world is an interest in commercial opportunities using open source geospatial.  Most people are aware of the success of companies like Red Hat, MySQL, and others using general open source projects like Linux, MySQL, Sendmail, and others.  In open source geospatial the best known examples that I am aware of are DMSolutions (Canada), Orkney (Japan), and Refractions (Canada), but I believe there are actually many more out there that we are simply not yet aware of.  The advantages of starting a business based on open source geospatial are low cost of entry (open content also helps reduce the cost of entry), an opportunity in a relatively new, as yet uncrowded, area, rapidly growing demand, and vehicles like the OSGEO.org for someone new to this area to become known fairly rapidly.  An example of the last is Haris Kurtagic from SL-KIng in Slovenia who has developed an open source Oracle FDO data provider which he publicized on the OSGEO web site.  Haris is now on the Steering Committee of the OSGEO MapGuide/FDO project and SL-KIng is quite well known internationally as a result.  I would recommend to anyone who is thinking of starting his or her own business to look at open source geospatial, especially web mapping and the Feature Data Object API (FDO).  The last time I checked there had been 3,000 downloads of FDO and at least five FDO data provider projects underway.  This is a great way to get started in open source geospatial, especially if you are familiar with an application for which there is not yet a full FDO data provider.  For example, there is a crying need for an FDO data provider for MapInfo data files, which are especially prevalent in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.    Since OGR supports MapInfo data files and there is an OGR data provider for FDO, it is already possible to read MapInfo data with FDO.  But in my opinion, the most important distinguishing feature of FDO is that it is a Web 2.0 phenomenon because it provides a full spatial edit API.  The world needs a fully edit capable FDO MapInfo data provider.

Leveraging the value of CAD data

One of  the dimensions of the point of inflection which has been occurring in the geospatial world over the last year or two is that spatial is becoming increasing less special.  What this means in practice is that geospatial enabling is what most organizations are turning to as they include spatial data in their IT processes these days rather then traditional GIS.

A very good example of this is what is happening in the world of network infrastructure, which in practical terms refers to the power, telecommunications, water, waste water, cable, and other public utilities that you rely every day.

Managing Maintenance Costs

A rule of thumb for organizations responsible for maintaining network infrastructure is that maintenance represents 90% of the total cost of network infrastructure over its entire lifecycle from planning, through design and construction, operation and maintenance, to decommissioning.  An essential requirement for ensuring profitability is managing maintenance costs.  An important tool for managing costs is a digital model of network infrastructure.

Creating Network Infrastructure Data

Most of the world’s network facilities data has been and continues to be captured using CAD-based desktop applications.  For example, it is estimated that there are billions of CAD drawings files worldwide and the chief reason is that in most organizations the business process for building new network infrastructure relies on CAD to create the original engineering design.  Another reason is that that virtually all conversion vendors, the folks that convert paper to digital data, use CAD desktop tools for capturing network infrastructure data from paper-based construction drawings.

Leveraging Network Data throughout the Infrastructure Management Lifecyle

The business process by which network facilities data is captured and managed is comprised of several steps.  Engineering uses CAD-based tools to create construction drawings. Construction drawings are almost invariably paper drawings used by Construction in the field to build facilities.  Construction drawings are returned from Construction to Records as paper as-builts which are captured into a geospatial datastore, which in the past was a traditional GIS and which is the permanent database of record for network facilities.  This information is then used by Records to provide facilities maps, reports, and data to Sales, Marketing, Operations, Trouble Call, One-Call, regulatory agencies, and other internal and external consumers of network infrastructure data.

In most utilities and telecommunications firms, infrastructure data management processes are characterized by islands of information, Engineering (CAD), Records or Network Documentation (GIS), Construction, and Operations use their own specialized applications which are linked by paper-based information flows.  These processes are inefficient, slow, unresponsive, and expensive. 

Significant improvements in quality of service and reduction in cost are feasible by breaking down these silos of information to streamline the flow of information by leveraging the original CAD data throughout the infrastructure management lifecycle.

Data Quality

Inaccurate and out-of-date data is expensive.  It means missed business opportunities, loss of productivity, and higher costs.  Data quality in many utilities and telecommunications firms is poor and is an important factor in increasing for example the “cost per access line”, an important metric monitored by telecommunications firms.  There is a direct relationship between poor data quality and a high rate of returns or repeats.  Repeats refer to service requests that require more than visit.  In many utilities and telecommunications firms repeats comprise 25-30% of service requests.

Intelligent Model-based Network Facilities Database

A key requirement for managing network infrastructure efficiently and reducing maintenance costs is an intelligent, model-based database of the network facilities which represents a single point of truth accessible across the organization.  The data model of an intelligent facilities database includes location, class or type of equipment, properties, and relationships to other facilities for every element of plant in the network.

CAD/Geospatial Value Chain

The route from a paper drawing to an intelligent infrastructure management system involves several steps, and can be perhaps most easily understood in terms of a CAD/Geospatial value chain.

Level 0

The original record of network infrastructure in most utilities and telecommunications is paper drawings.  A large telecommunications firm will have millions of paper drawings.

Level 1

The next step toward automating infrastructure data management is CAD, which revolutionized the creation of construction drawings.  Traditonally CAD was focussed on producing paper construction drawings.

Level 2

To enable the preparation of maps on a geographic landbase, geospatial capabilities were added to desktop CAD applications, such as geographic coordinate systems, so that the location of facilities could be placed on the earth's surface.

Level 3

The next major step forward in automating the management of network infrastructure involved the concept of class.  Class refers to type of equipment.  For example, in a power network pieces of network plant can be classified as primary conductors, secondary conductors, transformers, fuses, and switches.  Each class of object typically has a set of properties which describe each object, such as input voltage, output voltage, manufacturer, year installed, etc.

Level 4

One of the most important advances in IT in recent years has been the extension of relational database management systems (RDBMS) to include spatial data types and spatial indexes.  Virtually all of the widely-used RDBMSs in use today are spatially-enabled.  These include Oracle, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, MySQL, Informix, and DB2. An important advantage of storing spatial data in a spatially-enabled RDBMS is that it provides open, standards-based access based on SQL, ODBC, and JDBC.  All of the major geospatial vendors support one or more spatially-enabled RDBMSs.

Level 5

The final stage in creating an intelligent database and infrastructure management system involves  support for relationships and constraints.  Relationships include connectivity relationships, such as connecting a primary conductor to a transformer.  Other types of relationships include those between structural elements such as poles or manholes and equipment that actually carries electricity such as primary and secondary conductors and transformers.

Relationships are important because they enable traces, for example in the case of a power network, a downstream trace to identify customers affected by a disabled transformer, or an upstream trace to identify the sub-station feeding the transformer.

Constraints are essential for data quality and prevent the user from entering bogus data.  Typical constraints are property constraints, for example, restricting voltages to those supported by the network, or restricting the year of installation to between 1950 and 2007.  Another important type of constraint restricts relationships between classes of objects.  For example, a primary conductor can be connected to a transformer or another primary conductor,  but not to a river.  Another example is requiring that a transformer has a single primary input and a single secondary output. 

Solution Architecture

Geospatial enabling means that  now the basic tools you need are a location-enabled CAD desktop, a geospatially-enabled RDBMS, an application for  enforcing constraints, managing metadata including stylization, and enabling traces, and a web mapping tool.  It is no longer necessary to implement a traditional GIS.  This approach simplifies and reduces the cost of the implementation, especially for engineering focused organizations familiar with CAD tools and wanting to avoid the cost of implementing a traditional GIS.