Farallon Geographics Maximizes Return on FME Investment for City of Santa Rosa and Town of Danville

San Francisco, CA, September 26, 2009 --(PR.com)-- FME is the leading ETL (extract transform, load) software tool for migrating spatial data between CAD, GIS, and departmental business systems. But to effectively use FME, companies must develop efficient, manageable, and effective workflows that correspond to their precise business needs. By using a well-developed methodology for business analysis and technical workflow development, Farallon Geographics helped the City of Santa Rosa and the Town of Danville maximize their investment in FME.

Farallon worked with the City of Santa Rosa to define its requirements of utilities data that originates in CAD for use both in its ESRI-based Enterprise GIS and in its Hansen Asset Management System. Farallon defined, developed, and implemented an FME-driven process that ensures the integrity of CAD data as it moves into the GIS, populates a long series of spatially derived attributes for use in other systems, and synchronizes the features with their Hansen Asset Management inventory. Previously, CAD mapping staff literally handed data entry staff paper maps to illustrate which assets needed to be keyed into Hansen. This new ETL workflow, automated using FME, results in saved staff time, greatly improved data accuracy, and a solid GIS-Hansen integration that allows Hansen users to leverage the City’s GIS investment.

Farallon implemented FME for the Town of Danville to automate the task loading fresh county-generated parcel data, in shapefile format, to their Oracle XE/GeoMedia database. Some of the major challenges included:

· the county’s source shapefiles changed schema over time,
· the Town stores its data in a slightly different coordinate system than the county’s source data, and
· the Town needed to collect a series of spatially-derived attributes as the data were migrated into its database to support its Property Review system.

Using its innovative interface, FME provides protection from the risk of a changing source schema by showing broken source to target attribute linkages. Additionally it easily handles the issues of coordinate system transformation and spatial data extraction using inbuilt transformers. The process of importing county parcel data now requires a fraction of the time and effort previously required.

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