Posted by Don Murray, President of Safe Software
It’s hard to believe it’s almost a week since Safe Software concluded our first FME Worldwide User Conference, which we hosted at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia – about a forty minute drive from our offices in Surrey. Although the staff who were involved in the conference are back in the office and settling back down to their more usual routine (although I’m not sure that anything at Safe is ever truly routine), the opportunity to participate in the conference and meet many users face to face has had a tremendously positive impact on our staff. I can see that many have experienced for the first time what Dale and I experience routinely as we travel: there are few things more motivating than the enthusiasm our users have for our products, and the realization that Safe’s software is employed in projects that are integral to many local infrastructures and regional economies worldwide. Another reason for the upbeat mood around the office is that the conference itself not only ran without a hitch, but was, all in all, just plain fun. To have 77 participants attend from 16 countries was also tremendously encouraging and a strong motivation to host another worldwide UC in the not too distant future.
Early in the planning stages we decided that the conference theme should be Exploring the Possibilities. In choosing this theme, we were alluding to the fact that FME’s potential to perform an amazing number of tasks is not always immediately obvious to the new user. Our hope was that the conference would encourage users to venture beyond FME’s straightforward data translation capability and begin to understand just how powerful this software really is.
After deciding on the theme, we somewhat nervously put out a call for user presentations, wondering how much interest would be generated. As it turned out, we were blown away by the response. In the end, 16 of the 21 technical sessions offered at the conference were presented by users, and featured either user case studies or how-to advice. The wide variety of topics covered in the presentations and the level of expertise demonstrated by our presenters was a fitting demonstration that there are many FME users out there who are exploring the possibilities of our software in ways that we at Safe have barely begun to envisage ourselves. Not only does most of the credit for the very positive feedback we received about the quality and content of the conference belong to our guest presenters, but they were also willing to let us post the slides of their presentations on our website, so that others interested in FME could benefit from their stories. I’ve included a list of presentations from the technical sessions at the end of this post. If you find one of interest, you can view the presentation slides on our conference page at www.safe.com/2006uc.
Since the conference coincided with our 10th year of FME, we decided to open the conference proper with two sessions on the history of Safe Software, with Mark Sondheim and Peter Friesen from the Integrated Land Management Bureau of the Government of British Columbia generously agreeing to give the Keynote. As a company, we owe a tremendous amount to Mark and Peter’s vision and foresight. Back in 1991, the SAIF (Spatial Archive Interchange Format) data model that Mark and Peter developed for the BC Government was adopted as Canada’s national interchange standard. Their Ministry then began issuing contracts for a practical encoding scheme for this model. In November 1993, Safe Software (with myself as the sole employee at the time) won just such a contract, based on the idea of using ASCII zipped into a series of blocks. The rest, as they say, is history. Well, a few more details could be added, maybe in another blog posting...
If you’re interested in a peek at future developments at Safe, The Road Ahead address that Dale and I presented is available on our conference page as well. Look for it under Day 2 of the session slides.
Safe Software has a reputation for not taking ourselves too seriously, and we couldn’t resist adding a few fun events to the conference agenda. Our FME Idol competition, the first of its kind at any FME user conference, was well received, which was largely thanks to the good humour of our four contestants. Raghavendran.S from India, (also known as SRG among his FME colleagues), Hans van der Maarel from the Netherlands, Peter Laulund from Denmark, and British Columbia’s own Jason Birch battled for the title of FME Idol, to be awarded to the first to solve one of two challenge questions. Since all four of our contestants hold coveted Safe Software MVP awards, we designed challenge questions that were definitely no cakewalk. To add to the pressure of solving the challenge before a waiting audience, our contestants were subjected to a stream of disparaging comments from the judges, in true FME Idol style, and - as Jason Birch noted in one of his two blog postings on the conference - also had to contend with the added distraction of the unveiling of Ulf Månsson’s latest FME art masterpiece. (You can read Jason’s blog postings on the conference at
http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2006/09/22/35/fme-worldwide-uc-day-one/
http://www.jasonbirch.com/nodes/2006/09/25/36/fme-uc-day-two-or-two-days-late-and-several-dollars-short/ )
In the end both Jason Birch and Peter Laulund effectively tied for the title of FME Idol. Both picked the second challenge, which involved decoding some FME steganography and outputting the results to KML. What made this result so interesting was that Jason used FME’s Workbench application, but Peter used good old mapping files along with Tcl (and all accomplished using a North American keyboard), somewhat weakening our argument that Workbench is more productive than the more dated mapping file approach.
If you have FME installed and you’d like to try the two challenges, you’ll find the datasets on our conference page. When you’re ready to say “Uncle,” you can check out the solutions created by our contestants here as well. SRG’s solution to the first challenge is also interesting, as it shows the spatial distribution of the home city of all the conference attendees and clearly demonstrates that this “worldwide” conference was a truly international event.
The Lightning Talks session was another first for an FME conference. (A lightning talk is essentially a five-minute window in which the presenter must convey one facet of an idea or topic clearly and succinctly.) Despite the fact that this session was a last-minute addition to the agenda, we had eight participants come forward. Again, the quality of the presentations was impressive, so we decided to include the slides from these sessions on our conference page as well. (See the list at the end of this post.)
One of our goals for the conference was to make the whole event very interactive, and have as many of our staff available as possible to meet directly with clients, hear their feedback, and answer their questions. With the aid of a few rented white lab coats and stethoscopes, our programmers and Professional Services support staff were transformed into “FME Doctors” who were on call throughout the conference to diagnose specific spatial data transformation problems and recommend remedies. Some of the specialists on duty included a Raster Surgeon, FME GP, Topological Hygienist, Holistic Workspace Therapist, Raster Reprojectologist, and a Vectorinarian. Many of the questions posed to our doctors would be of interest to our wider FME community, so watch for another blog posting on this soon.
As promised, here’s the list of lightning talks and technical sessions from the conference:
LIGHTNING TALKS
- My Favorite Custom Transformers, Dmitri Bagh, Safe Software Inc.
- MRFCleaner in the San Jose Airport, Gary Zhang, MRF Geosystems Corporation, Calgary, Alberta
- Emissions Modeling with FME, David van Blankenstein, Forte Consulting, Victoria, BC
- INTERLIS and FME: The Model Driven Approach, Jeff Konnen, INSER SA, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Exploring www.fmepedia.com, Mark Ireland, Safe Software Inc.
- Raster Reprojection Experiences with SDE, Dean Hintz, Safe Software Inc.
- Linear Referencing Model Transformation, Mark Stoakes, Safe Software Inc.
- FME & Spatial Relationship Enforcement, Mark Stoakes, Safe Software Inc.
TECHNICAL SESSIONS
Session 1: FME and Local Government
- FME at the City of Nanaimo: A Home Run Jason Birch & Tim Taylor, City of Nanaimo, BC
(Migration to an enterprise-wide GIS database and data synchronization) - Geomatics and FME from a Corporate Perspective, Nadia Namini, City of Calgary, AB
(Waterworks and wastewater asset management - FME used for complex integration of multiple MicroStation design files and multiple Oracle database tables and output to many ArcSDE layers) - Building Polygons – the QA Way Bob Janowicz, GIS Innovations, Vancouver, BC
Session 2: SpatialDirect Implementations
- SpatialDirect in a European Cross Border Project Mark Doering and Christian Heisig, con terra, Germany
(OGC standards-compliant web-based spatial data distribution in multiple formats) - Integrated Cadastral Information Society’s use of SpatialDirect to Deliver Digital Data to its Members Ken Rigler, ICIS, Victoria, BC
(OGC standards-compliant web-based spatial data distribution in multiple formats) - Customizing SpatialDirect Ken Bragg, Safe Software
(OGC standards-compliant web-based spatial data distribution in multiple formats)
Session 3: FME and ArcGIS
- What’s New in ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension 9.2 Kim Avery, ESRI Redlands, and Tyson Haverkort, Safe Software
- FME & ArcSDE / Geodatabase Mark Stoakes, Safe Software
Session 4: Scripting and FME
- Tcl and Mapping Files – Best Practices Peter Laulund, National Survey and Cadastre, Denmark
- Using FME Objects Python API to Provide Platform Independent Translations Andrew Smith, Lagen Spatial, Australia
- Customizing Your FME Translation with Python Tom Weir, Safe Software
Session 5: Best Practices for FME
- Flexible Extraction and Transformation from ArcSDE to AutoCAD Ulf Månsson, SWECO Position AB, Sweden
- Sharing FME Resources Mark Ireland, Safe Software
- Database Tricks and Tips Robyn Rennie, Safe Software
Session 6: Enterprise-Wide FME
- Integrated Land and Resource Registry David van Blankenstein, Forte Consulting, Victoria, BC
(FME used to merge disparate data sources, and update data daily or hourly) - SpatialDirect at the Danish National Survey and Cadastre Peter Laulund, National Survey and Cadastre, Denmark
(Web-based spatial data distribution system using Oracle Spatial, FME and SpatialDirect) - Capturing SpatialDirect Usage Statistics Jason Close, Latitude Geographics Group Ltd., Victoria, BC
(Capturing statistics on use of Safe’s web-based spatial data distribution)
Session 7: Advanced FME Applications
- Ordnance Survey Meridian 2 (Great Britain) – Data Production Process David Eagle, Dotted Eyes, UK
(FME used to quality assure digital vector data, build topological structures & write to various formats) - Network Visualization Jon Lenihan, ACE*COMM, UK
(Telecommunications – working with an Oracle database, ESRI ArcSDE and ArcIMS – consolidating multiple disparate GIS systems, customer systems, and network systems, and combining with demographic data)
Session 8: FME and Cartography
- FME Supporting Cartography, Real World Examples Hans van der Maarel, Red Geographics, The Netherlands
- The Great Banana FME Recipes to SVG Symbols Raghavendran.S (a.k.a SRG), PIXEL INFOTEK PVT. LTD. (Writing symbols into SVG using FME)
To view slides from these presentations, visit our conference archive at www.safe.com/2006uc.
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