Safe Software - the Spatial ETL Experts

New Blog “It’s All About Data” Launched

2009-02-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

Our new blog It’s All About Data is now available at blog.safe.com. All new messages will be posted on the new blog and not here. Visit It’s All About Data today to check out our new look and to read some of the most recent posts by our blogging team.

Can A World With One Data Format Exist?

2008-10-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

I came across some interesting discussions on data models and data formats today on Vector One that are well worth a read: “What is a Spatial Data Model and Why are they Important to Understand?” and “What If A Global Modeling Environment Were to Offer Compatibility With Multiple File Formats?”

At Safe, we’re very familiar with the issues at play here. Over the years we have seen a number of initiatives come and go to derive an “uber-format” that can store and accomplish everything. The problem is that even if you can make such a thing, it becomes so complex that few tools will support it and even fewer users will understand it.

Jeff Thurston poses the question “Now consider - would we be any further ahead today if we had one data format?” In our experience, the answer is that it isn’t possible to even imagine a world with just one data format, precisely because, as Jeff acknowledges, “We need the right tools collecting the right data for the right purpose.”

Because of the diversity in purpose for geospatial data, there is a diversity in tools which have a diversity of requirements. This ends up imposing a diversity of file formats, each tuned for a particular situation and, even more importantly, holding a diversity of data models. It is precisely this data model issue, as the Vector One folks acknowledge, that truly is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to creating interoperating systems.

At Safe, we’ve been proud to play a key role in providing tools to help users smash through both the data model barrier as well as the format barrier. In our opinion, any attempt to get interoperability has to address both of these. Just the format is not enough.

As James Carville would say, “It’s the data model, stupid” …

The Convergence of Geospatial and BIM

2008-10-15T12:51:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

Susan Smith recently wrote an interesting article in GIS Weekly about Autodesk’s Digital Cities initiative entitled “Digital Cities: Where Geospatial and Building Information Modeling Converge”. This article is definitely worth a read if you’re interested in this rapidly growing trend in the geospatial industry. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot more about Digital Cities and the Autodesk initiative, and it will be very interesting to see the types of results that it will generate.

At Safe, we’ve been convinced of this trend and the importance of getting 3D and 2D data working together. That is why we’ve been working on a 3D and BIM initiative of our own for the past year and a half. FME, our spatial data conversion and integration technology, can read IFC (a standard BIM format) as well as write to 3D formats like 3D PDF, VRML, CityGML. We’ll also introduce support for OBJ and 3D Studio Max as output formats in FME 2009 early next year.

We know we still have a lot of work to do to fully realize our goal of providing full-featured 3D and BIM support in our FME product line, but we’re well on our way and look forward to playing a key role in the broader creation of digital cities…

FDO News

2008-10-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

Autodesk recently announced two new FDO providers at the FOSS4G conference – and this Cadalyst article quoted Safe’s user wiki, fmepedia, to help define what an FDO provider is.

What the article doesn’t mention is that FME Desktop ships with an uber FDO-provider that can read all the formats that FME supports, including rasters. You can also apply our schema transformation technology through the FDO interface via the Custom Formats feature which allows live-on-the-fly data restructuring as the data is read. This means that without ever doing a translation, the user can see exactly what they need to, even when they want a different view than the originating schema of the source file.

We’ve got a demo on the FME FDO Provider for AutoCAD users which shows how all this works. Anyway, it was great to see fmepedia contributing to the greater body of knowledge of the Geospatial World…

Microsoft SQL Server Spatial is live - and supported by FME

2008-08-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

Many people have been excitedly anticipating the release of Microsoft SQL Server Spatial, and the wait is now over. Because Microsoft holds such a large database market share (some sources state that Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft make up 83% of the market), this move means that the three most widely used database formats now unequivocally support spatial data.

Attending various focus groups over the years, I’ve seen that there’s a clear appetite for spatial data within SQL Server – in fact, people had come up with ways to store spatial data within SQL Server already, but since these methods were not widely accepted they didn’t gain significant traction in the market place. The official support for spatial data within SQL Server will make it easier to introduce GIS in markets where it hasn’t previously been front of mind or practical to implement.

At Safe Software, we try hard to quickly add support in FME for database formats as they emerge because we understand how important it is to for potential users to be able to move their existing data in and out of the new system. We’ve been supporting Microsoft formats for many years now here at Safe, and so it was logical to quickly introduce SQL Server Spatial to FME’s supported formats list last year, well before the updated database was officially released. On a personal note, Ed Katibah and his team provided great support throughout the development process which helped to make the resulting read/write capabilities so crisp.

We’re looking forward to seeing the many projects that FME and SQL Server Spatial will be used in together now that the database has officially hit the market. Johannes Kebeck has already posted one concept on his blog Hanne’s Virtual Earth Blog. Take a look at his workflow involving FME, SQL Server Spatial, and Virtual Earth.

Do you already have plans to use FME together with SQL Server Spatial? Let me know in the comments what you’re planning to do.

ESRI User Conference – GIS for the Masses, Thanks to the Web

2008-08-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

- posted by Don Murray

I just returned home from attending the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego last week. At all the tradeshows I’ve been to this year, ESRI’s show being no exception, I’ve seen a clear move of GIS data and functionality to the web. The availability of spatial information is critical to fast decision making and collaboration between information holders – and ESRI’s ArcGIS Server looks like a winner both in terms of distributing great looking maps and providing powerful geo-processing services.

Many people stopped by our booth to ask for demos on how to publish spatial ETL tools authored with ArcGIS Desktop and the Data Interoperability extension to ArcGIS Server 9.3. This is in contrast to previous years where users were almost exclusively interested in how our technology behind the ArcGIS Data Interoperability Extension enables ArcGIS Desktop to work with non-ESRI data formats. Users are now very interested in using ArcGIS Server to share maps in non-ESRI formats and publish geo-processing tools. Moving forward, the market can expect to see Safe Software and ESRI continue to bring more of Safe’s spatial ETL capabilities to the ArcGIS Server environment, providing organizations with a single GIS system for data conversion and transformation and further empowering the exchange of spatial information.

The shift of GIS data and functionality to the web is making data harmonization more important as the number of data sources online is exploding. At the conference, we heard more discussion of people moving away from large, central databases and into more of a mixed model in which there are some large central databases, but also many smaller data sources accessible over the internet. By offering spatial ETL capabilities at the server level, organizations will be able to use different schemas for sharing data than they use for their internal systems. These views of their data exist only for data sharing purposes and allow them to participate in spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives with no impact on their internal workflows.

As data is becoming more available through these data sharing and harmonization initiatives, GIS is really stretching beyond its traditional boundaries into the hands of more users. This was made evident as I walked the exhibit floor, seeing exhibitors such as Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of the Blackberry, and many other vendors which show that GIS is taking off in the main stream: Microsoft, HP, EDS, Oracle, Google, IBM and more. GIS isn’t just for mapping and GIS departments anymore. It is being used by businesses to make better decisions. Within the GIS world, we’ve long known that GIS gives businesses insights which provide them with a competitive advantage in the marketplace, but to see vendors from outside traditional GIS catching on is very exciting.

From our standpoint at Safe Software, our focus is all about uniting users with the data they need. While enabling people to get their data out to the masses, we can only imagine what great things these users are going to do with the data, and what amazing applications will be built for them.

Safe Software and WeoGeo to Bring Spatial ETL to the Cloud

2008-07-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

- posted by Don Murray

We recently announced our partnership with WeoGeo to bring FME technology to the cloud. We’re excited as this is the first venture to bring spatial ETL to the cloud’s infrastructure, and it promises to make spatial data even more accessible for end users.

Initially, WeoGeo will introduce FME Server’s spatial ETL capabilities to the www.WeoGeo.com data download marketplace, allowing their customers to transform data into the format and data model they require – in essence, making the data immediately usable to the end consumer. Later, WeoGeo’s cloud computing expertise will help us make FME Server deployable on the cloud, giving the geospatial community a new and innovative way to take advantage of our data distribution solution.

We’ve already seen a great deal of interest in this partnership since our announcement. Paul Bissett, CEO of WeoGeo and I spoke with Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine for an article and podcast which elaborate on our partnership and provides some background on cloud computing.

It is great to be part of the excitement as the geospatial industry turns their interest to the cloud. I’m looking forward to the innovative things our customers will continue to do with FME Server, especially now that it’s moving to the cloud.

Another FME-Supported Format Hits 1.0: Introducing GeoJSON 1.0

2008-07-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

On June 16, 2008, GeoJSON version 1.0 was announced, a large success for a small group of dedicated volunteers. This news is important to people around the world who share spatial data over the web because of the new format’s ability to exchange information much faster than we’ve seen before.

GeoJSON has added a way to communicate location data in the JSON specification – which is known for its powerful ability to specify data in a way that a Javascript web browser can use instantly, without needing additional deciphering. As you can imagine, this substantially speeds up data sharing. Check out Chris Andrews’ article in Directions Magazine which explains the value of GeoJSON in more detail.

As a company that works with a lot of formats, we at Safe get to see them born in all sorts of ways. The fascinating thing about GeoJSON’s adoption was that a small, self-appointed community came together to quickly create a very practical specification using a lightweight, informal adoption process. Most impressive was their pragmatic agreement on a regularly controversial topic: how to express x and y coordinates. While other formats often encounter confusion on the issue, the GeoJSON community made a quick, efficient decision to express them x,y.

Even as the GeoJSON format was in draft stages last year, we introduced support in FME because we saw that this specification had the potential to meet the emerging market need for faster online sharing of spatial data. Since then, we and many others have been playing with GeoJSON to find out just what kind of cool things can be done.

Back in September last year, our customer at the City of Nanaimo, Jason Birch, explored the possibilities of using FME to access and transform GeoJSON data. He posted some scenarios on his blog that made use of GeoJSON’s ability to quickly share spatial data over the web. He not only consumed GeoJSON data from web services, he also used FME to integrate GeoJSON data with data from other web services, creating mashups.

Today, sharing spatial data over the web is not just cool, it’s often a necessity. Anything that can make this process faster and easier is welcomed. Since GeoJSON clearly has a lot of potential for speeding up the communication of geospatial data over the web, I think we’ve only just seen the beginning!

Insights from Europe: Metadata (Part 2)

2008-06-19T08:58:00.000-07:00

- posted by Don Murray

I recently blogged about my latest trip to Europe where I demonstrated FME Server to some of our European partners and customers – many of whom are involved in the INSPIRE initiative. During my visit I received some great feedback about FME Server and valuable suggestions which we can apply to our ongoing development back in Canada. One of the most important discussions we had surrounded the growing need for metadata, motivated by INSPIRE’s metadata specification project and SDI projects in general.

Historically, spatial data access within an organization has been done with high ceremony. What I mean by this is data was either created internally or purchased from a well known data vendor; in either case there has been a high cost of getting data (money and/or effort). Because of this, organizations have traditionally defined clear uses and requirements for the data before they acquire it to ensure that it suits their needs. This information about the data is what metadata is all about. With this information users can determine if the data meets their requirements.

Often over time this metadata degrades because traditionally it has been stored in an ad hoc manner, scattered in documents and people's heads. This lack of metadata maintenance can lead to real problems for organizations when they take their historical data holdings and attempt to use them for new tasks for which the data is not suitable.

As tough as the situation can get for organizations and their historical data holdings, the whole problem of understanding data is exacerbated when data becomes available on the web. How are organizations able to take advantage of this data? How are organizations even able to find the data they’re looking for on the web?

The answer is metadata. Today more than ever, organizations need the ability to get data about data!

Metadata is not new but has always been a key part of an organization’s data assets. The difference now is that with data moving much more freely, we need ways to effectively and efficiently communicate metadata so that organizations are able to determine if a specific set of data is applicable for their task at hand. This is what the ISO 19115 metadata specification (used by INSPIRE and other SDI’s) is all about.

The ISO 19115 document states that metadata is all about enabling users to discover, evaluate, and use spatial data. By selecting a standard approach for metadata, INSPIRE will greatly improve this communication.

We at Safe Software often say that our business is “All about the Data” – and metadata is “Data about the Data.” The rising importance of metadata goes hand in hand with the increased accessibility of spatial data over the web. As data continues to become more widely available through SDI projects like INSPIRE, the significance of metadata will continue growing. As part of our commitment to evolving our product to meet the progressing needs of the market, we’ve already begun work on developing metadata support in FME and anticipate its release in FME 2009.

Next week I’ll be in Slovenia to participate in the European Commission INSPIRE Conference 2008 where I’ll be demonstrating how FME Server can help SDI participants get their data into the required specifications (semantic translation) and distribute it out over the web as a contribution to the initiative (data distribution). Join me for my presentation entitled “Apply the Power of Server-based Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Initiatives” on Tuesday, June 24, at 4:00 pm, and come visit me at the Safe Software booth. See you there!

Insights from Europe: INSPIRE, SDIs and FME Server (Part 1)

2008-06-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

- posted by Don Murray

I most recently travelled to Austria and the Netherlands and met up with over 160 different FME Users and partners! I always enjoy traveling to Europe as we have many great partners and users that freely share with us the activities in Europe and the directions that they would like us to take our technology.

During this trip we demonstrated FME Server to our European partners and customers to share examples of its data distribution possibilities, but also to gain initial feedback on what functionality users want. These discussions are what make traveling and meeting clients worthwhile and guide us on ways to make our FME products better.

What made our demo of FME Server so exciting for the Europeans is its ability to help governments participate in the INSPIRE spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiative. During my visit, customers reinforced that semantic translation is the key to participation; that is, being able to translate and transform the data they have into the common format and schema that the initiative mandates.

If you haven't had a chance to see FME Server in action you are in for a treat. FME Server is a "data agnostic, web mapping agnostic, web server agnostic, database agnostic, operating system agnostic" mash up platform. That is you can take data from any where, transform it, and send it to anything you want.

When we designed FME Server, we wanted to make it possible for organizations to bring data together from any supported system (or from other web services) in a way that allows them to choose their preferred system, be it ArcGIS Server, ArcExplorer, Google Maps/Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, OpenLayers, Poly9 FreeEarth, something else, or a combination of apps. Our customers love this because they can use FME Server to satisfy their data access and transformation needs while being free to use whatever tools do the best job for the task at hand.

I also received great feedback about our support for OCG standards as this was a critical point for many of them, being that they are the key specifications for the INSPIRE initiative.

I’m looking forward to seeing the many ways that customers all over the world will be using FME Server to participate in their own SDI initiatives as this movement continues to mobilize and grow.

Watch for my next posting on more insights that I gained while in Europe, specifically on metadata.

FME Back On Stage in Vegas. Feature Act: SDI Initiatives

2008-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz

FME receives an encore in Vegas! After a fascinating performance at MapWorld on May 21, 2008, FME is back, this time at Caesar’s Palace for the Intergraph 2008 Conference.

Intergraph is well known for their conference socials, so I’m interested to see what they’ll pull off in Vegas this year. I wouldn’t put it past them to get Elvis up on stage!

FME will be performing in my presentation on using spatial ETL to move data into GeoMedia for Efficient Sharing. I’ll show some examples of our innovative customers and their use of FME in their spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives.

If you’ve been waiting to see our newest product FME Server perform, come on over to our booth, #805 where we’ll be giving regular demos of FME Server with live Intergraph G/Technology data.

Hope to see you June 2-5, 2008 at Caesar’s Palace to “Experience the Power of VEGAS!”

So What Exactly is Spatial ETL?

2008-05-22T22:27:00.000-07:00

- posted by Jaylene Crick

We’re glad to see that spatial ETL is becoming more of an important topic for companies looking to transform and distribute their spatial data. Since Safe coined this term way back in 1993, the industry has seen a lot of changes. Be sure to check out Don Murray’s recent article in GeoInformatics Magazine (page 24) about what spatial ETL means, and how it keeps the focus on spatial data. This might be useful in your endeavors to champion the case for spatial ETL in your own organization.

Enjoy!

Jaylene

PS – The magazine cover features a globe created by our very own Dmitri Bagh; it shows one sample of what’s possible now with FME’s new 3D support by taking a simple text file containing average elevations of 1x1 degree cells and creating a cool 3D globe.

Safe On Location at Where 2.0

2008-05-21T09:04:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz

After hearing lots of stories from Kevin Wiebe, our Chief Scientist, upon his return from Where 2.0 the last three years, I finally decided to check it out myself this year. Don Murray, Kevin and I trekked down to San Francisco for what certainly was an exhausting (9am to 11pm, one track, one room, three days), but mind-stretching experience.

The show was unlike anything else I’ve ever attended. For one thing, it was the first spatial show I’ve attended where attendees may not know who Jack Dangermond is – when he took the stage the woman sitting next to me asked who he was and how to spell his name. It was also the first show where I witnessed Google and ESRI sharing the stage, displaying their products working closely together. And it’s a show that’s known for its IRC back-channels where the ongoing banter of attendees rumbles quietly on as speaker after speaker take the stage. (Hopefully we don’t add that dimension to next year’s FME Worldwide User Conference, subjecting me to occasional mockery!) But truly, their humourous if sometimes irreverent remarks were always insightful and added another dimension to the conference experience.

The great thing about attending such an untraditional conference is that I was inundated with topics that stretched my understanding of what can be done with location information. There is definitely change taking place in our wired ecosystem. One presentation showed how Twitter can play a role in responding to emergencies as the recent cyclone which had such a devastating impact in Burma by providing an easily used communications backbone for communicating status and points of interest in real time. And Chris Anderson’s talk on Do-It-Yourself-Drones for high resolution home aerial mapping has got me plotting some cool projects to do with my sons…

As for ideas directly related to FME, I left convinced we need to add support for the new Geohash (and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash) into FME—I can see this being useful in some situations—kind of a modern version of our old GOID (another idea a bit ahead of its time) crossed with the MGRS system. And maybe we should consider adding an easy way to parse location from the location nano-formats Twitter users are standardizing on.

On the formats side, there were no earth-shaking format announcements that affected our plans for future development here at Safe (unlike other years). However, it was great to see so many real-life uses of the “formats of the GeoWeb” that we’ve been working hard to support. In fact, Andrew Turner’s slide from his talk on the GeoStack (you can see his last-year’s deck related to this here) provided a good summary of the formats of the GeoWeb, and confirmation to me that we were on the right track with our format support in FME and FME Server. Since before the term GeoWeb was even coined, the format support of FME has allowed it to straddle the two worlds of the GeoWeb and traditional GIS. FME (and FME Server) will continue to play an important role as a bridging technology between these two universes, and we’ll be working hard to ensure our support of these GeoWeb formats is second to none. Indeed, as a result of the conference, we updated our bubble diagram of the type of formats FME supports to include GeoWeb as a family in its own right.

All in all, 3 mind stretching days, well worth it. See you there next year!

FME On Stage in Vegas. Feature Act: Data Accessibility

2008-05-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

- posted by Tyson Haverkort

We’re heading to Vegas! MapWorld 08 is live in Las Vegas this week, and FME will be performing.

The first day of the conference, I’ll be presenting on “Accessing Data Where it Lives,” showing how FME technology allows you to connect to a wide range of formats, directly from within MapInfo.

FME will also be ‘on stage’ at our Safe Software booth, #303 during exhibit hours. I’ll be giving demonstrations and am glad to customize them for anyone who asks.

Hope to see you May 21 – 23, 2008 at the RIO!

KML is an OGC Open Specification!

2008-05-08T09:21:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz

It has been twenty years since The Trade — the day Wayne Gretzky left Edmonton for Los Angeles — and like every other Oilers hockey fan, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. The day I first saw KML in action is just as vivid: standing at our customer’s site, watching him demo his own data in Google Earth, we all knew we were witnessing great history in the making.

In the beginning, a big part of the KML magic was its close tie to the platform it was designed to serve – Google Earth. I think it is fair to say that without Google Earth, there would have been limited interest in KML. That platform was arguably more revolutionary than KML in that overnight it made vast quantities of spatial data dramatically more accessible than anyone had previously envisioned. At first, for most people it was just gravy that there was a documented format for adding one’s own content to Google Earth; but for those of us inside the spatial industry, the possibilities were truly mouth watering.

The one-two punch of Google Earth and KML meant that otherwise non-spatially-interested folks in any walk of life could quickly understand the power of spatial data and begin asking to see items they cared about, overlaid on top of the rest of the imagery. And thus the push to bring more and more spatial data to KML.

One of the first files I pushed through FME to KML was a sample dataset we’d been using here at Safe Software for more than five years. Because I’d always been viewing it in traditional tools, I simply knew the data as a map of an oil field somewhere in Alberta. Was I ever surprised when I opened up the freshly minted KML file in Google Earth and saw that the site was located right where I grew up! One of the great benefits of KML was that when you viewed it, you got context. For free!

Now here we are, not quite 3 years later, and the OGC has accepted KML into their fold, essentially cementing KML into the record books as a powerful format for spatial communication. You can see the OGC’s press release of their announcement here to read their perspective on the importance of this decision. KML has grown from being used only by Google Earth to being supported by Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Maps, ArcGIS Explorer, and many, many other spatial applications. Having KML as a standard will ensure interoperability between these platforms.

In the work that we do at Safe, we’ve seen a lot of different formats — including the impacts of the other main XML format of our time, GML — so it wasn’t hard to tell that KML would also carry great influence. Ironically, we still get asked the same question as we did when KML first came out – isn’t it the same thing as GML? As we somewhat clumsily pointed out in our interview with Directions Magazine, they are not the same thing at all. They may share some commonalities under the covers, but they really do target different things. While GML is about content, KML is about display. There is quite a difference – I think Chris Schmidt’s recent posting on this is worth reading if you, like me, find spatial data formats a captivating topic.

Looking back, we’re glad that we at Safe jumped to provide support for this format as quickly as we did, because KML has filled this visualization need for many of our customers. While we immediately sensed KML’s value, we didn’t realize is that KML would make celebrities of our friends at the City of Nanaimo, who pioneered the way in bringing the capabilities of KML to the city context. More recently at our FME Worldwide User Conference, our friends from Burns and McDonnell explained how they use FME to create a spatial project dashboard in Google Earth. The opportunities for KML continue to grow as the technology takes hold.

Losing The Great One was a negative turning point for fans of the Edmonton Oilers, but the introduction of KML and the free viewers for it (like ArcGIS Explorer, Google Earth, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth) to the GIS industry has been a powerful, positive disruption which has tossed us into a whole new era of spatial data. These last few years have been a great time to be part of the GIS industry. I look forward to the future growth of KML as an open specification, and to watch the impact that OGC’s standardization of KML will have on the format and the geospatial ecosystem.

3D and BIM Data Integration: What’s the Hurry?

2008-04-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

- posted by Don Murray

3D and BIM are causing more than a stir in geospatial technology. They’re affecting the way construction is doing business and the way cities are planning their infrastructure and emergency response. The growing demand for 3D and BIM data is making an impact in these areas, creating a desire to join together 3D, BIM, and traditional spatial information for a more integrated data view. As part of this wave, increasing pressure for organizations to plan for a greener future is further encouraging critical infrastructure planning to turn to 3D and BIM data assets to help them achieve their goals.

Joe Francica of Directions Magazine recently examined this movement in his article entitled “3D, BIM and Going Green: Cities Are Challenged by a New Geospatial Revolution.” During his research for the article, he spoke with Geoff Zeiss who moderated a panel at the GITA Conference on Emergency Response and CAD, GIS, BIM Convergence. He validated the increased demand for 3D and BIM data and explained some of the challenges surrounding integrating this data.

At Safe Software, we are seeing exactly what Joe talks about. Anticipating this market shift, both ESRI Geodatabase and Oracle Spatial now support 3D data, enabling them to directly store BIM data. More of our clients are inquiring for a single tool that is capable of loading both traditional geospatial data (vector, raster) and building (BIM) data. This is exciting as more cities will now be able to use a single data store to hold all of their location information, opening the door to a whole new class of applications which can take advantage of this new “integrated data view.”

Take a read through his article, and leave a comment. Let us know what you think of the use of 3D and BIM data in critical infrastructure planning and other areas. In what ways are 3D and BIM data being integrated into your world?

FME Worldwide User Conference 2008 Wrap-Up; Technical Presentation Slides Now Available Online

2008-03-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

- posted by Jaylene Crick

Were you able to attend this year’s FME Worldwide User Conference? We thoroughly enjoyed being part of the fun as over 150 FME users, partners and Safers interacted, learned, and shared their knowledge.

The conference started out with Safe’s co-founders, Dale Lutz and Don Murray, unveiling the upcoming announcement of the latest advancements in spatial data access with the release of FME Desktop 2008 and the newest addition to the FME family, FME Server. Their famous duo performance was a big hit as everyone learned about the new dimensions this latest release brings to spatial ETL (extract, transform and load).

Peter Batty, the keynote speaker, shared some amazing applications of cutting-edge technology in the geospatial realm. It still amazes me that a 3D model of Notre Dame could be pieced together simply from photos posted on Flickr.

Over the two days, FME users and Safe partners had the opportunity to share their knowledge in 28 technical sessions presented by customers from all over the globe. We thoroughly enjoyed hearing about all the interesting projects that FME is being used for – from tracking the success of food programs in Africa to providing real-time data in Google Earth dashboards and improving cartographic charts to enable pilots to safely find runways. If you missed the conference, it’s not too late to get a taste of the information that was shared at these sessions. Check out our FME Worldwide User Conference 2008 Presentations Web Page for the list of presentation slides and videos of the keynote addresses.

FME users also shared their complex data conversion challenges with Safe’s Doctors on Call, comprised of our own Safers from the support, professional services, and even development teams. The Doctor’s Office received a great turnout with many customers solving their FME project challenges thanks to healthy remedies from our doctors.

Back by popular demand, the FME Idol competition challenged four FME experts to a set of mini FME projects. Jeff Konnen of INSER SA took the coveted FME Idol title! Long-time expert Peter Laulund of KMS took an honorary mention for performing the entire contest using only the original command line instead of the FME Workbench interface!

We’ve already begun planning next year’s event, looking for ways to make it even better! Have ideas? -- What time of year is best for you to attend? What location would you prefer? Would you like materials for your boss, explaining the benefits of the conference? Are there things you loved or didn’t like as much? Leave us some comments. We’re looking forward to hosting even more FME fans next year!

FME On the Road

2008-03-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Don Murray

As I write this I am on my way to talk about the release of FME 2008 that we just announced yesterday. As I reflect on this release, I am filled with great excitement about what the Safe team has achieved. This is a monumental release for many reasons. Thinking through it, a stream of thoughts compete in my mind: things like CADRG Writing, FME Server, 3D, BIM, Object Data and enhanced database support.

With the addition of 3D/BIM to FME, I see a common pattern playing itself out. Over the past decade we have seen a great progression of spatial data types. For each of these types, we first encountered them in file based systems and then later in databases. This was the pattern for vector, raster and 3D data types within FME. The thing that is surprising is that the amount of time between us embracing a new data type and the time before we supported it in a database has dramatically changed. The time between us supporting vector files and databases was measured in about a year; the amount of time for us to support raster was measured in months and the time to support 3D in a database was measured in weeks.

While the addition of 3D data to FME is very exciting to all of us at Safe it is in fact just a logical evolution of us building the only complete spatial ETL tool. It is safe to say (no pun intended) that 3D/BIM data is merely the expansion of data from the “macro” to the “micro” or from “exterior spaces” to “interior spaces”. What is truly exciting is what our users are going to do with this new type of data once it is able to move freely from application to application using FME.

With this release we have also pushed the number of formats that FME supports to well beyond 220. This got me thinking back to the early days of FME (circa 1995) when we focused our messaging on the format aspects of FME. In retrospect I think that we have been too successful doing this as even to this day many people think of FME as the format conversion tool and Safe as the format people. Of course, formats are still a part of the solution that FME provides as format support is necessary, though not sufficient, for effective communication of spatial data from one application to another. I often tell a story of my first trip to the UK where I learned first hand that format is not enough for communication and data model is really the key thing. In that case the “data” was electricity, the data format was the big UK plug, the data model is the mismatch between Canadian electric voltage and UK electric voltage. During that data model lesson a poor hair dryer paid dearly.

As time has moved on over the years, what we mean by the word “format” has evolved as we have moved from a file centric world to an application centric world. Here is the format definition from an FME perspective:

Format: A “data endpoint” that can be represented by anything that can store, consume or produce data. This includes but is not limited to files, databases, applications, devices, sensors or web feeds.

Looking forward we are now referring to the work we do as “Powering the flow of spatial data.” The more I reflect on this the more I like it. Another change is that we are stepping away from spelling out the words “Feature Manipulation Engine” since it is a mouthful. Looking at the new slogan I see how this too has evolved and how the acronym and it’s the vision for the product are as relevant as they always have been.

First, Feature is a word we use to mean “data”. This is what flows through the data pipe that is FME. If I was asked what F stands for I would have to say that F now means Format. See above how we define format. When you think of FME of course we want you to think about Format even though it is not our focus.

Second, Manipulation is a word that means the same thing as transformation. Back in 1995 when my good friend Dale and I came up with the product, it had a focus on model manipulation right from the start. Indeed when you think of FME think of its Manipulation (now called Transformation) capabilities.

Third, Engine is a word that we use to mean “Powers data movement”. After all what engines do is create power for moving things and doing work. Just as an automobile engine powers the movement of people and cargo we power the movement of data. This coupled with the continually growing support for formats and the transformation capabilities of FME results in something that we and our users are really excited about.

To truly appreciate FME, you must experience it for yourself. I encourage anyone who isn’t fluent with FME to download our tutorial and experience the wonderful things that can be done once you have an engine that unleashes the flow of your spatial data from wherever it is to where you need it. Not just where you need it but where you need it in the data model that you need it in.

Now imagine if you could provide that data model transformation capability to users both inside and outside your organization with just a couple of clicks within FME Workbench, and you start to understand why we are so excited by the launch of FME Server.

Data Validation and Quality Assurance with FME

2008-01-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

- posted by Mark Stoakes

Over the last few months, the Professional Services team here at Safe has done a lot of work with customers on data validation and quality assurance. Drawing from two major projects we’ve worked on in the last year, I recently delivered a presentation showing the approaches we’ve taken in using FME to validate spatial data and attribute data.

For this blog posting I thought I’d publish an article that summarizes my presentation. If you’re interested in using FME for data validation and QA, I think you’ll find it a worthwhile read.

Data Validation and Quality Assurance with FME.pdf

Let me know what you think of these approaches, what you’ve done to integrate FME into your data validation and QA plans, and what ways FME could be improved to overcome challenges you’ve encountered – leave a comment!

Ramping Up for the Worldwide FME User Conference – Our Biggest Yet!

2008-01-23T17:28:00.000-08:00

- Posted by Jaylene Crick

Can you believe it’s already January 23rd? We’ve been so busy preparing for this year’s FME Worldwide User Conference, that we almost missed the early bird deadline, Jan 24th!

By the end of the month we’ll have more insightful thoughts coming your way on this blog, but for now we’re so excited about the plans we’ve made for the conference that we’re bursting to share them.

Safe’s founders, Don Murray and Dale Lutz will be on hand at the show, along with many of the Safers you’ve already worked with. Everyone’s looking forward to interacting with you, hearing about your experiences in the industry and with FME. There will be lots of time to mingle together in discussion groups, Q&A sessions, workshops, and a fun evening event in the heart of Vancouver.

This year we’ve invited GIS visionary, Peter Batty, to join us as the keynote speaker. He’ll lend us his perspective on the latest trends and challenges in the geospatial industry. We’ll be discussing many relevant topics including 3D geometries and spatial data federation, and we’ll expose some new ideas right out of the box – including a sneak-peak at our latest big developments here at Safe.

Over the show’s two days, there will be eight technical sessions where you can pick from three hands-on FME workshops and 28 practical presentations covering several major themes:

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)
CAD to GIS conversion
Mapping
Data Integration & Quality Control
Neogeography & Google
FME Best Practices

Hits from last year’s show will be back including Lightning Talks – quick five to ten minute presentations on specialized subjects – and our Doctor’s Office session to answer your tough technical problems. We’re also challenging FME experts with another round of FME Idol. Contestants will work on technical projects while we all look on, giving you the opportunity to quiz Dale and Don with your questions.

So the countdown continues – only 43 days left until we get to see all of you in person right here in Vancouver, BC!

Until then,
Jaylene

P.S.
Tomorrow is the last day to save $250 on your registration for the conference. If you’re attending the training sessions, you can save even more. Check out our FME Worldwide User Conference web page for more details and to register.

www.safe.com/fmeuc

Christmas Treats from Safe

2007-12-21T13:59:00.000-08:00

Seasons Greetings from all the staff at Safe Software! As a token of thanks for your interest in following our blog throughout the year, we’re pleased to share with you a few special Christmas gifts:

1. A new Safe Software corporate website, along with a visual makeover of this blog (and coming later this month, a fresh look for fmepedia)
2. A new edition of our very popular “Safe Around the World Challenge”

Amongst all the excitement of visiting with friends and family over the Christmas season, we hope you’ll find a few moments to sit back, relax, and enjoy these two treats.

Here are a few more details:

New Safe Website
Check out http://www.safe.com/. This new website is a great resource to help spread the word about spatial ETL and how FME can help. It’s designed for market awareness and education. And, you’ll see that the navigation and flow is much easier to follow. For current FME users, like many of you who read this blog, we’re also in the process of giving fmepedia, our FME user wiki an updated look. Next year we hope to expand our efforts further to ensure that the deep technical resources and “how to” materials are more easily accessible on the wiki. Take a peek at the new sites and let us know what you think.

Safe Around the World Challenge
The new Safe Around the World Challenge is a great way to test your knowledge of famous locations around the world – especially after enjoying your turkey dinner. When we released our first Safe Around the World Challenge last June, we were actually quite surprised by the response. As news about the Challenge spread, this web page rocketed into the top twenty most frequently viewed pages on fmepedia.com. So if you’ve already completed our first Challenge, thanks for your support! We hope you find this new Challenge just as much fun as the first one.

If you haven’t yet checked out our initial Safe Around the World Challenge, and are wondering what it’s all about, here’s the inside scoop: essentially, the Safe Around the World Challenge is an on-line “name the location” puzzle that was inspired by a single snapshot sent to Safe by Curt Carlsson of Metria, Sweden. One glance at Curt’s photo, which shows a Safe water bottle against the backdrop of Mount Blanc, got several Safe staff thinking along the same lines: Wouldn’t it be fun if we could set up a puzzle by geo-tagging photos of Safe merchandise in locations all over the world? Participants could guess the locations, and then check their answers in Google Earth? Using photos sent in by FME users and those contributed by frequent travelers amongst Safe’s staff, we soon had a collection of 19 snapshots assembled and posted on fmepedia.com. And the rest, as they say, is now part of Safe’s history.

From all of us here at Safe Software, we hope you enjoy these new Safe treats.

Wishing you a very merry holiday season,
The Safe Software Team

GIS Days Event at Institute of Ocean Sciences Reveals Many Opportunities for Safe’s Data Integration Tools

2007-12-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

- Posted by Dean Hintz

In late November, Safe was given the opportunity to present at the first ever GIS Days event at the Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS). (Located on Vancouver Island, the IOS is one of nine scientific facilities operated by Fisheries and Oceans Canada.) Historically, most of the tradeshows and conferences Safe has attended have focused on interoperability solutions for land-based spatial data. So when I was tagged to present at GIS Days, I looked forward to gaining some interesting, first-hand insights into challenges related to GIS data management and analysis of the coastal waters of British Columbia and the Northeast Pacific. And I was not disappointed. I’ve included here some of my impressions gleaned from the event, for interested readers. But first, here’s a quick overview of Safe’s presentation.

I have to admit that, prior to this event, I wasn’t sure how much interest my presentation would generate amongst the oceanographic community. But it soon became clear that the sixty or so attendees shared a common and acute interest in finding common data standards and means for exchanging and integrating their oceanographic data. Safe was widely recognized as a company that has much to contribute to this community – not in terms of establishing common data models per se, but in enabling organizations to move data between various models and formats and integrate diverse data types.

The keynote address by Steve Grise of ESRI on Arc Marine, a geodatabase data model for marine applications, obviously resonated with the group and was well received. Fortuitously, the agenda had been planned in such a way that I was able to follow up Steve’s discussion with an overview of Safe’s FME platform, with a focus on FME’s support for moving data between common marine formats. As an example, I showed an FME Workbench workspace that took S-57, E00, Shape, DWG and Caris data and loaded it into PostGIS. Since data in this industry can also often be spreadsheet based, or in some kind of semi-structured text file, I also showed how to use FME to extract X,Y, and Z values from a spreadsheet of IOS survey data from Georgia Straight, then transform this to point geometry in KML and overlay the results on Google Earth. I included a new demo I created recently that always seems to generate a lot of interest – a 3D time-step simulation, displayed in Google Earth, modeling flooding of Vancouver’s downtown core in the aftermath of a tsunami. Towards the end of the presentation, I showed a 300 year NetCDF global land use development dataset overlaid on Google Earth. While the demo did not use oceanographic data, it turns out that NetCDF is a very important raster format for storing multi-dimensional gridded data for the ocean and atmospheric sciences. In this case, one file contains many bands where each band represents global land use for a specific year. The audience did seem impressed by how easy it was, with FME, to extract data from this complex raster structure and transform it so it could be loaded into a schema compatible with KML raster time-step. The result was replayed as a global animation of changing land use covering the last 300 years.

Returning now to my impressions of trends in the industry, a number of interesting themes emerged, all related in one way or another to the need for data integration. I was surprised by the degree of convergence that is occurring between the atmospheric, land and oceanic sciences, in terms of data formats and standards, both in the vector domain, such as with ESRI Arc Marine, and in the raster domain, such as with NetCDF.

There was strong agreement amongst participants that data sharing and GIS analysis is seriously hindered by the lack of integration tools to support common data models– models rich enough to integrate data from many different sources and provide information on diverse elements in the marine environment. What is needed urgently are models that provide information not only on quantitative information such as water depth, but also qualitative information that better supports the marine domain, such as bottom type, roughness, hardness, and habitat type. The need to capture metadata and accuracy information was also stressed, as was the need for tools that more fully support semantic translation, that is, translations that preserve the original meaning of the data, not just the data values. Finally, the need to more readily integrate across datasets with very different data structures was also made apparent, for example combining vector depth information with data from raster sonar grids.

This push for new, improved data models and data integration for the marine domain seems to be driven not only by the ocean science community, but by interests involved in security and defense, as well as environmental organizations and disaster management agencies. Many of these agencies are beginning to invest and participate more in marine surveying and data management. And for good reason. Representatives from several of these groups articulated an awareness that support for richer data models – those that can integrate many different types of survey data – will allow for a much improved understanding and management of the environment, and allow these agencies to efficiently allocate limited resources. Environmental management organizations, for example, have much to gain from improved data models that enable automation of tasks such as habitat assessment. Based on some of the presentations and my discussions with folk from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), it’s clear ocean floor mapping using multi-beam and backscatter analysis is becoming increasingly important to organizations like the DFO. With this new information on substrate type added to traditional data on depth, salinity, and temperature, the DFO anticipates new capabilities to predict fisheries management factors such as the number of fish that can be supported in a given region, without the need for extensive field surveys.

For agencies involved in defense, richer models that include information on substrate characteristics are better able to support GIS analysts searching for new objects in the environment. Once information on substrate can be included in the analysis, new survey data will quickly reveal, for example, a large metal object lying on the ocean floor. The tell-tale sign in such a scenario might be an increase in hardness or smoothness of the substrate, compared with previous survey records that characterize the substrate in that area as “soft” or “rough.”

In my mind though, the most pointed examples of the need for better models and data integration tools for marine data were provided by agencies involved in coastal disaster management and emergency response planning. Despite the fact that many disasters in the world are coastline based, integrating land and marine data to build accurate maps of the coastline remains a significant challenge. Simply determining what exactly constitutes the coastline is problematic. Ocean maps typically trace the coastline at the low tide level, whereas land-based maps trace the coastline along the high-tide level.

Robert Kung of Natural Resources Canada further underscored some of these hurdles. In his discussion, Robert revealed that the challenges of integrating sub-sea slope measurements and substrate information with land-based data is currently hindering efforts to build landslide prediction models for the eastern shoreline of Howe Sound. The highway along this steep shoreline is the only traffic corridor leading from Vancouver to the Whistler ski area, where many Olympics 2010 events will take place.

The good news in all this is that, once enhanced models are established, sophisticated spatial ETL tools such as Safe’s FME can provide a way to move diverse existing data types into these preferred models. Safe’s FME Server technology for web-based sharing of many different types of data also has much to offer the marine GIS community. Judging by the number of discussions focused on spatial data infrastructures and web portals, marine interests are now feeling a growing responsibility to make their data available to a public with a growing appetite for geospatial data. For me personally, listening to some of the discussion around web-based data access was a sobering reminder of the serious difficulties organizations face in sharing information, in the absence of adequate models and data sharing tools. As a case in point, a presentation by the Canadian Navy revealed that much of the essential spatial data for one domain awareness system resides in something like a dozen different applications on a dozen different computers tracking everything from weather to surface temperature, water currents and benthic data. And here’s the kicker: since there is no data interoperability between these applications, information is shared by simply taking a screen capture and emailing the JPEG image or pasting it in a report. And there’s no geo-referencing attached to the data. When I hear that organizations are struggling with these kinds of issues it sure motivates me to get out there and spread the word about FME!

Given the opportunity, Safe would certainly attend another GIS Days event at IOS. Most of the presentations were of high quality, and Terry Curran of the Canadian Hydrographic Service is to be congratulated for pulling together a well-organized and diverse gathering in under a month, with minimal resources. For us at Safe, the event provided a timely reminder that our spatial ETL technology is as relevant to the management of marine data as it is to land-based data.

Read the Inside Scoop from Safe in the Safe Insider

2007-11-16T15:18:00.000-08:00

- Posted by Catherine Wilson

Usually, Safe's blog is the place to go for this latest news and ponderings from Safe. But today, we're referring you somewhere else to read the latest buzz. We're sure you'll find it worth the trip!

Why? Well, we've just released the Winter 2007 edition of Safe's newsletter, the Safe Insider.You can check it out at www.safe.com/newsletter. Our previous issue received a very positive review by Glenn Letham of GISuser.com, and we think you'll find this new installment just as informative. We’ve included lots of FME tips and highlighted new resources that should help you gain more value from FME.

Here's a look at just some of the topics covered:

Making more of FME's data transformation capability – a glimpse at some "favorite transformer combinations" used by other FME users to solve real-world problems

New FME Self Study Modules, including an entire module devoted to KML

Previews of new functionality coming in FME 2008, including the new FME Server

Technical "how to" resources that will help you take advantage of FME 2007's spatial ETL capability for raster data

Safe's new Certification Program for FME consultants and trainers

Of course, newsletters are great – but it's a one way conversation. So when you've had a chance to review your copy of the Safe Insider, do let us know what you thought of this latest issue by leaving a comment here, on this blog post.

Second FME Worldwide User Conference – Call for Papers

2007-10-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Catherine Wilson

The countdown to our second FME Worldwide User Conference has begun! Last week we issued a call for presentation proposals for the conference, which will be held here in Vancouver, British Columbia, March 6-7, 2008. If you missed it, the details about how to submit a presentation abstract are available on our conference web page at www.safe.com/fmeuc2008.

When we issued a call for presentation proposals for the first FME Worldwide User Conference just over a year ago, we were overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of the responses. So the opportunity to do this again is really exciting. In fact, if feels a little like hanging out our Christmas stocking early - we're not sure exactly what we will receive, but we know it will be great!

General registration for the conference will open in mid-November, so it's not too soon to start compiling the most persuasive travel proposal management has ever seen! We'd love to have you visit us here in beautiful Vancouver – home of Safe's offices and the birthplace of FME. As a little added incentive, we planned this event for early spring, so attendees can take advantage of skiing opportunities at nearby Whistler/Blackcomb resort, one of North America's premier ski destinations.

FME-ing and skiing – that's two great reasons to attend!

Knowing How to Answer, "What Next?" The Challenge to be Responsive Versus Reactive

2007-10-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Don Murray, President

The geospatial industry is really hitting prime time! Just last month, for example, The Economist published an article about our industry in the Technology Quarterly section of the September 8 edition. The article was focused on Google Earth and how this web application has changed the world (and hence the spatial/GIS world), and also discussed the work our friends in the Open Geospatial Consortium and at Galdos are doing to increase the interoperability of spatial data. The importance of this industry is beginning to be recognized by the general public, and it's exciting to be working with a great team as key players in the industry.

At Safe, we are continually working at breakneck speed to bring spatial data of all types to applications that use this information, because format and data model need not be a barrier to using any data. A key factor driving this rapid pace of development at Safe is our commitment to be responsive to what is happening in the industry. Responsiveness is one of our competitive advantages. We have built our entire development system around the goal of delivering a new FME build to customers on a daily basis, enabling us to quickly provide the formats and features requested by users and Mavens. (For a good book about the importance of Mavens, read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.)

A responsive approach can, however, be a dangerous approach. In attempting to be responsive, organizations can end up being reactive instead. A reactive company vaults from one task to another without a cohesive plan, and has difficulty maintaining a sense of direction and focus for its products. (The other extreme, of course, is a company that only pays attention to events in the industry at product planning time. Throughout the rest of the development cycle, the blinders are on.) For us at Safe, the challenge is to find a balance so that we can be responsive to users, but also move the core product plan implementation forward.

Being responsive is not easy. It requires the organization be one of "low ego." An organization that has low ego does not strive to prove something to users, but rather strives to deliver meaningful solutions. It also requires the organization to be flexible and willing to adjust or abandon plans in the face of unexpected events. With rapid change becoming characteristic of the spatial data industry, the ability to adapt is vitally important. Responsiveness also requires the ability to identify a winner. Of course, no one gets it right all the time. From time to time here at Safe, we add functionality later than we would have liked, or add functionality that no one cares about.

Being responsive doesn't just mean reprioritizing tasks – in many cases it means taking on completely new, unforeseen tasks. This is where Mavens become invaluable to an organization. At Safe we have benefited enormously from ideas provided by thought leaders in the industry – ideas that have ultimately made FME's spatial ETL capability even more relevant. GeoJSON is a very recent example of capability we have added for FME 2008 for that was first suggested by Mavens. And our last release, FME 2007, is riddled with examples of functionality we hadn't planned initially – the functionality was only included after it had been requested by third parties.

FME 2007 was our most significant release since the addition of the Workbench to FME. With FME 2007, users are now able to combine both raster and vector datasets as part of a single spatial ETL operation. This can be useful in countless ways. Some simple examples include the capability to check how your vector and raster data lines up, or to overlay contours on top of rasters to make the slope of the terrain much more apparent. One important new transformer for combining raster and vector data that was first suggested by an FME user and was eventually included in FME 2007 is the DEMDistanceCalculator. It takes both a DEM and 3D line work as input, and outputs a new DEM for each input line. The output DEM is the same size as the input DEM, but has values that represent the distance from the ground represented by the input DEM to the closest point on the ground. As it turned out, these DEM's provide great input for a noise analysis program that evaluates aircraft flight plans. Who knew such a thing would be useful? Certainly no one at Safe thought of this – the need was anticipated by our Mavens!

We are now working towards FME 2008. Like FME 2007, this promises to be another very exciting release. We will add support for 3D data and Building Information Modelling (BIM), as well as support for Microsoft SQLServer Spatial. We will also introduce our FME Server product to the market. But some of the most exciting functionality we will be developing for FME 2008 and beyond, however, is capability we haven't even envisaged yet; it's capability that our users have yet to suggest or ask us for.

So if you bump into myself, Dale, or anyone from the Safe team, do introduce yourself and share your data transformation wish list with us. We are always looking for the answer to that all important question: What Next?

FOSS4G – A Quick Review

2007-10-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

-Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Many have already posted excellent coverage of FOSS4G (for example, Peter Batty). However, I thought I’d take the opportunity to add my perspective on the 2007 conference as a delinquent member of the local FOSS4G planning committee and a non-open source commercial software vendor.

Firstly, my sincere thanks to all my committee co-members for working so hard to host this event – namely Paul Ramsey, Brian Low, Jason Birch, Evert Kenk, Tyler Mitchell, Dave Patton, Jeff McKenna, and Frank Warmerdam. The committee, as well as Ian Holliday and Vanessa from Sea to Sky Meeting Management, are to be congratulated for an extremely well organized event. Our entire Safe team marveled that there were so many hands-on learning opportunities available at a conference of this size – and available right throughout the week. Special thanks to Dave for running this aspect of the conference so smoothly.

It was a pleasure to catch up with many people I had not met in years. I learned that there's a great deal of open source work being carried out in Hawaii; I can't wait to travel there to meet with some of my new friends from FOSS4G (as well as some long-term friends)! Interestingly, I also met Mark Phillips for the first time. Mark was a key contributor to the code that eventually became the TIGER reader within FME and OGR. Long ago Safe funded this work through Frank Warmerdam, who had in turn subcontracted it out. It’s always nice to close the loop and meet face-to-face with fellow collaborators, even if it’s years later.

Of course the announcement on the first morning of the conference of Autodesk's plans to move the CSMAP coordinate system conversion technology acquired from Mentor Software into the open source realm was of great interest – and surprise – to our Safe Software contingent. We’ve used Norm Olsen’s technology (Norm is Mentor) since 1996, and it has always been a pleasure working with him. A quick review of my email archives turned up this note I received from Norm in 1997. I’ve included it here as an indication of the type of service he has always provided to his customers:

1) I have received your message and data file.
2) Have reproduced the problem on my system.
3) Am debugging it now.
4) Problem is not obvious, but will have a fix for you by tomorrow.

True to his word, Norm did have a fix the next day. (For those interested, the problem in question should have been impossible to create in the Canadian NTV2 grid shift file.) Norm’s arrival at FOSS4G was a very nice surprise – he’s a celebrity among Safe staff and we enjoyed exchanging coordinate system war stories together. At most social gatherings a comment like, “How about that Malaysian RSO system anyway – what were the British thinking?” tends to clear out the room…but not at FOSS4G! We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Norm, though in a new way, now that CSMAP has gone open source.

Dale and Norm Olsen at FOSS4G

Other highlights of FOSS4G included the sheer concentration of collective expertise present – our staff certainly learned much from the conference. As one of the commercial software vendors present, I can report that we certainly felt welcomed by the open-source crowd; both of our ten minute demo theatre shows were packed. It was very helpful to see the range of development going on. An awareness of this work ultimately helps us to serve our customers better by enabling us to focus our efforts in ways that complement or otherwise add value to existing initiatives.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by our demos, our lab session, or checked out our booth – we enjoyed meeting you and hope we’ll see you again, maybe next year in South Africa!

On the Road Again - This Time in Europe

2007-10-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Don Murray, President, Safe Software

In late September Dale and I had the pleasure of taking part in two FME user conferences in Europe – one in Münster, Germany, hosted by our partner con terra, and a second in Gävle, Sweden, hosted by Metria, ESRI S-Group and SWECO. The trip was memorable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that Dale was able to accompany me. Unlike the early days of Safe, Dale and I seldom travel together anymore; we usually divide responsibilities to accomplish all that needs to be done. It was a treat to attend both European conferences together this year. I have participated in each annual German FME user conference since the first conference was held four years ago, but this was Dale's first opportunity to attend. Conversely, Dale has traditionally been the long-time Safe representative at the Swedish user conference, having attended every one of the past four conferences. For me, this visit was only my second opportunity to attend.

During the conferences, Dale and I were responsible for a total of three different talks. Rather than divide them between us, we presented each one jointly, which is our preferred approach. It makes for a much more entertaining presentation for our users - especially when they are addressed by not one but two animated presenters who are both clearly passionate about FME.

Dale and I as the "FME doctors on duty" at the FME User Conference in Gävle, Sweden

The Biggest News about FME 2007 Isn’t Just Raster – It's Raster and Vector

Our first presentation was an overview of key enhancements in FME 2007. Those watching our company closely will know that the marketing slogan for FME 2007 was Now with Raster! highlighting the addition of raster capability to FME. In truth though, a better way to describe the new power provided by our latest release is FME 2007's ability to work with raster and vector data together in a single workspace. Indeed, the demonstration that seems to generate the most excitement amongst the audience is the simple FME Workbench workspace shown below:

This workspace simply mosaics a bunch of images together, performs a datum shift, and then retiles the images based on new tiles that are specified in a shape file. This simple yet useful workflow is just one example of how easy it is to combine raster and vector datasets in a natural way. The power of FME's Workbench application really shines when you begin to bring these different data types together. Talk about the perfect data fusion tool! But you haven’t seen anything yet. Just wait until FME 2008.

What's Next?

Our second presentation gave Dale and me the opportunity to demonstrate some of the neat capability that will be included in the next release of FME. This presentation was enthusiastically received and, I might add, a lot of fun to present. Our team of developers is larger than it has ever been in the history of Safe (and still growing), and is generating plenty of new functionality for our user community. I won’t go into too much detail here. Jaylene Crick, our new director of marketing here at Safe, is busy inventing all sorts of creative ways to bombard you with that information as the FME 2008 release draws near. Let’s just say that you are going to see more raster, more vector, and more database (SQLServer Spatial) support. You will also see FME enter another dimension as we tackle 3D data types with support for formats such as IFC, CityGML, and others. Last, but definitely not least, users will have an all new FME Server solution that will bring the power of Spatial ETL to more users than could ever be reached using a desktop application. With the FME Server and other work that's underway to enable users to access the web in a multitude of ways from within FME Workbench, our users will have a whole new set of tools to work with. Yes, 2008 is going to be a very exciting year for the entire FME community. Stay tuned for more on all of this new functionality in the months to come. Did I mention 64 bit FME?

The Master Craftsmen of FME?

For our final presentation, Dale and I had initially planned to deliver our "FME Tips and Tricks" presentation. During this presentation, Dale and I typically share some of our experiences with FME and how we have solved key data manipulation challenges. But after seeing the presentations given by other FME users, we abruptly changed our strategy. It was obvious to us that the "Master Craftsmen of FME" are no longer Dale and myself, but rather the "troops on the ground" in the industry (as well as our own Professional Services team back home). There are more and more people out there who spend much of their work day using FME Workbench (as well as a few still using FME mapping files)! These people are the true FME Master Craftsmen – users like Peter Laulund, Lothar Plötner, Frank Zimmerman, Ulf Månsson, Wolfgang Hausch, Oliver Heimann, and Michael Habarta - just to name a few. It's a new situation for us, but Dale and I recognize that we, and the other developers at Safe, are now merely the tool makers when it comes to FME. Our future task is to determine what components need to be improved or added so the craftsmen can continue to excel at their craft. After all, FME is like any tool - in the hands of master craftsmen it is immensely powerful and can produce amazing results.

Software Design Patterns and FME

In light of the realization that our audience contained so many FME users whose skills eclipsed our own, Dale and I began to discuss potential new topics for our final presentation. Prompted by a recent meeting Dale had with Emil Vulin at a GE Smallworld user group meeting in Australia, Dale suggested basing our presentation on software design patterns. (Emil is highly respected by both Dale and myself for some earlier ground-breaking work using software design patterns with FME Workbench to manipulate Smallworld data.) Dale and I first heard about software design patterns way back in 1994 at the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications conference (OOPSLA) in Portland, Oregon. Software patterns provide generic repeatable solutions to commonly occurring problems in software design. Dale and I drank in all we could about this "new" concept and in fact used many of these patterns to design major components of the FME architecture. The fact that the architecture is still there and working in FME is a testimony to the resilience of these patterns.

As a potential topic for our own presentation, software design patterns was ideal since it offered something for both the novice and expert FME user. After all, FME Workbench is a software development platform - an integrated development environment (IDE). In fact, a couple of weeks earlier, when I was visiting Ross Miller and Bob Hewlett at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), they mentioned that BCIT was considering using FME Workbench as an example of a graphical programming environment for one of their courses. To learn more about software design patterns, you can download the powerpoints from this fmepedia page. I'd encourage all the FME Master Craftsmen to contribute their own design patterns to fmepedia so all FME users can review them - there is something here for everyone.

Interestingly, right after we gave this presentation at the FME user conference in Sweden, the next presenter, Peter Laulund from Denmark, opened his talk with the comment that he invariably uses patterns to build his mapping files. Peter has common patterns that he uses over and over. A common strategy in many of the patterns is to put attribute mappings and style metadata in external files or database tables, and then use FME's Joiner or SchemaMapper transformer to use this information when run. This can greatly reduce the amount of effort required to maintain a workspace and enables the mappings to be changed using simple tools like Microsoft Excel.

SchemaMapper – a Mystery No Longer

Ah yes, the Schema Mapper! This tremendously useful transformer has been shrouded in mystery for far too long. But Mark Stoakes and his team (our own Master Craftsmen at Safe) have helped to lift the shroud with their recent creation of a fantastic sample workspace that illustrates thirteen different uses for the SchemaMapper. Each example includes a CSV file that shows how to apply this transformer. Mark's team has also prepared a nice summary Excel spreadsheet as well. I encourage you to take a look at this information on fmepedia and download the SchemaMapper examples to appreciate the power of this transformer. I think the examples will change the way you work with the FME Workbench authoring environment.

Thanks Curt

By far the most memorable moment of our European visit was the opportunity for Dale and I to personally present Curt Carlsson of Metria, Sweden, with an FME Pioneer award. Without Curt it is safe to say that FME would not be what it is now. We first met Curt in Palm Springs at an ESRI User Conference where Dale and I gave our first ever FME demo. In those days all you needed to use FME was your favorite editor and a little time. OK, perhaps more than just a little time. Many who saw our demo in those days didn’t really understand why two crazy Canadians from Vancouver were so excited about this FME software they had created. But Curt immediately understood the value of FME and even bought a license. In fact, the first license he bought was for Solaris! That's what I call a pioneer! Curt became an ardent FME evangelist, and effectively introduced FME to Europe. Thanks Curt!

Curt bringing the first delivery of FME’s over the North Pole himself back in 1997!

We have worked closely with Curt and other FME friends in Sweden for over ten years now and continue to do so to ensure that our support for all things Swedish remains top notch. The latest example of this is the integration of the Swedish GTRANS reprojection engine into FME 2007.

Dale and I owe Curt, and Christian Heisig of con terra, Germany, as well as many others, a huge debt of thanks for organizing two fantastic user conferences for 2007. The conferences are just the most recent examples of the tremendous amount of work these folk have done to promote FME in Europe. My thanks to you all. I can't wait to visit again!

Looking Forward to FOSS4G 2007

2007-09-17T22:40:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

In just over a week, a sizeable contingent of Safe Software staff will be taking the ferry across to Victoria to participate in FOSS4G. (That's the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial conference, for those who prefer long-hand.) It's a huge bonus to have this international event hosted virtually in our own back yard this year. We've certainly done our part to boost participation at the conference, and it looks like attendance will be off the scale compared to previous years.

Although other "Safers" have attended FOSS4G regularly in the past, this will be my first opportunity to attend. Even more exciting, Safe will also have the privilege of participating in the proceedings for the very first time.* Given that Safe is a commercial software house, this is a privilege I don't take lightly, because I believe it underscores the close relationship Safe has with the open source community. Both Don Murray (Safe's president) and I have great respect for Frank Warmerdam and Daniel Morissette, who have been long-time friends. On a personal level, I can certainly identify with the ideology behind the open source movement. In fact, Safe's origins were in the open source arena. Back in 1993, Safe's first project was development of the SAIF Toolkit – a free library for reading and writing the SAIF format used by the Provincial Government of British Columbia. It was only later, when we started writing translators to enable diverse systems to use this format, that we switched to a commercial approach.

As a company, Safe has learned much from the example provided by the open source community. In terms of serving users, the quick reflexes of the open source community should be envied by all commercial vendors. We've endeavored to incorporate this kind of responsiveness into Safe's business model by maintaining a busy schedule of two releases per year for most of the last ten years, and also by offering the latest beta FME builds on our website - builds that are refreshed almost daily. Safe has also tried to match the prompt reaction time set by open source developers with respect to supporting some of the less complex, newly emerged formats. We recently earned a mention in Jason Birch's Random Nodes blog for adding support for JSON and GeoJSON to our betas before the specification for these formats had even been released. Prompt support of KML and GeoRSS has earned us similar kudos in the past as well.

It's difficult to come close to the spirit of collaboration that exists among open source developers, but we've tried to foster this in some way by hosting the fmepedia online community. Users can post code for specific data transformations (i.e. FME Custom Transformers) to fmepedia for sharing with other users. Safe also provides open APIs so others can extend and use our technology.

Like many other commercial companies, Safe has directly benefited from the efforts of the open source folk – we've embedded various open source packages in the source code for our FME platform. To show our appreciation for the work done by OS developers, Safe has sponsored a number of open source initiatives over the years. Currently, Safe is sponsoring work on GEOS, BigTIFF and GDAL, and we are gold level sponsors of the FOSS4G 2007 conference itself.

Our presentations at FOSS4G will emphasize the important role we see FME playing in light of growing interest in open source software in the geospatial arena. The industry no longer holds a “one size fits all” view of geospatial systems. Today, organizations that once used only proprietary applications are now taking a “mix and match” approach and incorporating both commercial and open source components into their geospatial system stack. But the same data interoperability issues that have long hindered efficient exchange of data between proprietary solutions are now encumbering data exchange in these hybrid systems. As a data translation and transformation tool, FME can solve these challenges by serving as a two-way bridge between proprietary and open source software, allowing easy flow of data in both directions. Since the transformation can be tailored to support the specific data models on either end of the data transfer, data can be loaded into the destination application, then returned to the source application, with no loss of information during the exchange.

FME provides similar advantages for those who prefer to use only open source solutions in their geospatial infrastructure stack – loading data into the various system components is quick and easy, and the full information content of the data is preserved. And that’s just the data translation side of the story. FME also provides an almost limitless number of ways to add value to your data, by applying a combination of over 270 “prepackaged” data transformations during data loading.

If you’re planning to attend FOSS4G and would like more information on FME, I hope you’ll find an opportunity to attend one of the presentations listed below. If you have some specific data challenges you’d like to discuss, do stop by our booth on the exhibition floor (#23) – Safe staff will be happy to offer their insights.

Before signing off, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the members of the local planning committee for FOSS4G - Paul Ramsey, Brian Low, Jason Birch, Evert Kenk, Tyler Mitchell, Dave Patton, Jeff McKenna, and Frank Warmerdam. Although I am also a member of this committee, my travel commitments have meant that my contribution has been minimal compared to the efforts and dedication of the other members of the team. They have worked extremely hard to ensure that FOSS4G 2007 is a resounding success, and I’m certain they will not be disappointed.

* Here's more information on the various presentations Safe will be involved in at FOSS4G 2007:

Safe’s hands-on lab session will employ six different scenarios to showcase the diversity of components from the open source stack that can be accessed using FME - components such as such as PostGIS, PostgreSQL, MySQL®, SQLite, GDAL, OGR, FDO and GEOS. A detailed description of this session is available at www.foss4g2007.org/labs/L-15. The workshop will begin at 8:30 am on 27 September in the Colwood Room.
Catch Safe’s 10-minute demonstrations during the Lunchtime Theatre in the Sydney Room on September 26 at 12:00 pm and 12:20 pm.
Stop by Safe’s booth (# 23) for a demonstration of FME’s format translation and data model transformation capability, or for a preview of Safe’s upcoming FME Server solution - a scalable, enterprise-ready spatial ETL processing environment. Booth visitors can also check out how well FME performs during the Integration Showcase – an interactive demo that will be running continuously during the exhibition to explore how effectively various solutions are able to integrate, process and serve up data provided by other conference exhibitors.

Read today’s press release on Safe’s participation in FOSS4G.

Walkabout Down Under - It's Never Just About the Technology

2007-09-11T17:31:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

I'm still catching up now that I'm back "up top" after spending three weeks "down under" in Australia and New Zealand. It was a fabulous trip with stopovers in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Christchurch (NZ), and Auckland (NZ). My family and I had looked forward to this adventure for some time. It was our first visit to Australasia and also my first foray south of the equator. And yes, the water really does swirl in an anti-clockwise direction as it disappears down the bathtub drain. The entire family was on hand to witness the long-anticipated experiment!

Originally, I envisaged this trip as primarily a family vacation, with the added bonus of opportunities to present at a number of meetings: the GITA Annual Conference/Oracle Spatial User Group Meeting* and a GE Smallworld User Group meeting in Brisbane, the first ever Australian FME user meeting - which was hosted by Lagen Spatial in Sydney - and an ESRI User Group meeting in Auckland. However, as plans for the trip unfolded, my calendar rapidly filled up with meetings with FME users from all over Australia and New Zealand.

But even though the trip did become much busier than originally planned, there are certainly no regrets there on my part. As I met with users during various events and privately scheduled meetings I was amazed, once again, at the many cool and creative ways our users are employing FME in the spatial data arena. There is a large contingent of FME users in this part of the world who have been using FME for many years now, and have achieved a high level of expertise. I saw many examples of tremendous achievements accomplished with FME, but it would be impossible to recount them all. At the FME User Meeting in Sydney, I was particularly impressed by presentations by Andy McKoy of Barwon Water and Ivan Price of Northern Territory Government, Australia. Barwon Water has integrated FME SpatialDirect into OpenSpatial's Enlighten product. Ivan Price spoke about four innovative ways Northern Territory has employed FME, including using FME to streamline the production of a book of maps. Each individual map was produced by clipping source data from the database, scaling a frame and legend to fit the map, and finally outputting each nicely presented map as an SVG file.

In New Zealand, I was very excited to see the work done by Niels Hoffmann of Landcare Research. Niels has completed a fantastic implementation of our new FME server - a great example of a clean, tight integration with ArcIMS 9.2. And the integration was finished even before Safe's FME server was generally available in beta! Landcare Research is compiling a spatial database of protected areas throughout New Zealand, based on information provided by many different government agencies. The FME Server implementation allows these agencies to upload information to Landcare New Zealand's database via the internet, and also, in turn, download information from the central database as required. In addition to fuelling my excitement about how people will use our new server technology, I owe Niels a huge debt of thanks for introducing FME to Landcare Research; Niels used FME extensively in his previous role working for ESRI Holland.

But it's never just about the technology. I so often find, as I travel, that the most rewarding aspect of the trip is connecting with so many fantastic people. I'm continually impressed by the character of the people who work in the GIS industry. It seems that, no matter where I travel, when I meet FME users I immediately feel that I am among friends. In every city, my family received a very warm welcome; many thanks to those who went out of their way to ensure that our visit was the best experience possible for the whole family.

It was especially wonderful to meet a number of folk whom I had not connected with in many years. Among these were Kim Olivier, who first introduced ESRI products to New Zealand, longtime FME enthusiast Bruce Harold, and FME users Lawrence Turner and Amanda Ferguson who were "FME pioneers" long ago when they worked for the City of Brisbane. It was great to hook up with Matthew Smart again too – thanks for the tour of Powerlink (Australia), Matt!

Meeting Simon Greener at GITA Australia was one of those moments that would have been accompanied by violins, had it been scripted in a movie. At one time Simon worked for Salamanca Software, based in Tasmania, and Salamanca became Safe's first FME reseller. As a result, Don Murray and I shared a booth with Simon at the 1996 ESRI UC – which was the first time Safe Software ever exhibited at a tradeshow. Simon was manning the booth with us, and was the first person to ever be "evangelized" into FME by Don and myself. I hadn't connected with Simon again since that trade show, so meeting him again was a nostalgic moment.

As for sight-seeing with the family, the most memorable trip was hiking to top of the volcanic cone that forms Rangitoto Island, and lies just offshore from Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. What had been a leisurely excursion suddenly turned into a race to catch the only early ferry when the women folk spontaneously decided that we should squeeze in a trip to Devonport the same afternoon!

I left with the satisfaction of knowing I had left a lasting impression on Australasia – I doubt there's anyone else alive who has distributed so many "sporks" on both sides of the Tasman Sea. I would have given Brett Madsen of Lagen Spatial dozens more, just for the pleasure of hearing him say "spork" each time, with his unique pronunciation.

Slides from the presentation I gave during the New Zealand ESRI Users Group meeting are available here: FME Technology Update

* Editor's Note: Conference delegates selected Dale's presentation as the best presentation delivered at 2007 GITA in Brisbane.

A Safe Software spork in the cockpit of a Royal New Zealand Air Force Hercules cargo plane

The family beside the Hercules – we didn't actually have that much luggage

GIS Data for the Disaster Response Crucible

2007-08-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

- posted by Catherine Wilson

Just a quick heads-up that Safe staff will be presenting at URISA 2007 in Washington DC next week (August 20-23). We'll also have a booth on the floor – this means you’ll have two opportunities to learn more about using, integrating and sharing spatial data!

Catch Wednesday's presentation by Drew Rifkin and Dean Hintz on solutions to developing useful GIS datasets for disaster preparedness and recovery. Drew and Dean will use a hypothetical disaster scenario to demonstrate how organizations can prepare to meet the challenges of rapidly sharing diverse datasets contributed by stakeholder agencies, even when the data have different scales, formats, data structures, and coordinate systems. The presentation is entitled Rapid GIS Disaster Response: Integrating Open Standards With Baseline Data and takes place on August 22 at 10:30 am in the Monroe West room at the Hilton Washington.

Stop by and visit Safe's booth (#317) from August 21-22. Drew and Dean will be happy to give you a one-on-one demonstration of the disaster response scenario from their presentation, or show you how to build a data transformation workflow in FME Workbench from scratch – one that meets your unique data transformation needs. Or challenge Drew and Dean to a spatial data showdown: bring along your toughest datasets and find out if there's really any data that FME can't read!

For more details of Safe's participation in URISA 2007, see today's press release.

City of Nanaimo's Google Earth Datasets Worthy of Recognition

2007-08-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

It was bound to happen sooner or later. When Jason Birch and his team at the City of Nanaimo started exploring the potential of FME and Google Earth™, I knew it was just a matter of time before someone noticed the ground-breaking work the City of Nanaimo was doing. So I was not surprised by Monday's article in The Globe and Mail - one of Canada's leading national newspapers. (Yes, I’m reading Canadian news even while I'm in Australia!) The article highlights Google Earth's commendation of the City of Nanaimo as the most progressive city in the world for sharing information with its citizens via Google Earth. Michael Jones, chief technical officer at Google Earth, is quoted as saying, Everything you could imagine that the city government would want to tell people, they seem to have found a way to tell that using Google Earth. We see other cities around the world doing this, but none with the degree and zeal of Nanaimo.

The media's acknowledgment of the City of Nanaimo's efforts does seem a little overdue. It's been more than two years since Jason started experimenting with the first release of FME's KML writer. As a GIS visionary and long-time FME enthusiast, Jason was one of the first FME users to recognize the complimentary capabilities of Google Earth and FME. Jason realized that FME provided an easy way to translate the City's existing GIS datasets to KML - the format required for Google Earth - and would allow the City to share their existing GIS information with the growing number of citizens who were using the newly emerged Google Earth application.

When the City of Nanaimo made their first KML datasets available to the public at earth.nanaimo.ca in 2005, the results wowed all of us here at Safe. As well as generating overlays showing the locations of local businesses, Jason's team had also used FME to create 3D models of buildings in Nanaimo's downtown core – the first 3D models we had seen any of our users generate with FME. To create the 3D buildings, the team extruded each building's 2D footprint with their building height. The orthophotos available back then were also overlaid using FME, but this is now handled within Google Earth itself. (This early data is still available in web archives.)

Jason's team and the City of Nanaimo are to be congratulated for finally receiving the recognition they deserve - it's great to see true FME pioneers acknowledged for their efforts. And Jason, this just proves you truly are an FME Idol…

For anyone interested in learning more about transforming their data to KML - both vector and raster - visit fmepedia.com, or watch our web page on KML at www.safe.com/google-earth. We're putting together some tutorials on generating KML with FME, along with some example datasets, and should have these available on our website by the end of the month.

A snapshot of the City of Nanimo's early 3D imagery generated with FME

The Safe Around the World Challenge

2007-07-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Can you identify the historic artifact in this snapshot? I'm referring, of course, to the Safe Software water bottle featured beside Safe's own Tyson Haverkort. Well, maybe Safe merchandise isn't historic yet, but perhaps someday?

For a fun blog posting to begin the week here at Safe, I'm throwing the spotlight on our Safe Around the World Challenge that's recently been posted on FMEpedia. It all started with a snapshot sent to us by Curt Carlsson of Metria, Sweden. Curt's photo shows a Safe water bottle featured larger than life in the foreground, and a famous European mountain in the background. The snapshot inspired us to create a fun new FMEpedia challenge using Safe merchandise as our equivalent of the "traveling nome." Safe staff are constantly traveling - either to attend conferences and tradeshows, or instruct FME training courses worldwide - so it didn't take long for us to assemble a collection of snapshots taken by Safe staff at various locations around the globe.

The Challenge was first featured in our most recent issue of the Safe Insider newsletter and is now rapidly gaining ground in our listing of the most popular pages on fmepedia. So why not check it out and see how well you do on this "Geography 101 pop quiz?"

To contribute photographs for the next round of the Challenge, you'll need to have your own Safe Software gear. You can check out the selection at www.cafepress.com/safesoftware or email us at aroundtheworld@safe.com. If we're impressed by the location you're suggesting for your photo shoot, we may just send you some free Safe Software gear.

I'm off to Sydney and Brisbane in Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, on August 1st to meet with clients and attend GITA, so you can bet I'll be taking plenty of snapshots Down Under for the our next round of the Challenge. Marketing suggested I slip a Safe water bottle into a kangaroo's pouch for a great snapshot – but I hear 'roos are expert kick boxers, so maybe not…

Transformers - More than Meets the Eye

2007-07-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

They are like nothing you've ever seen, and they've come to take over our planet…states an ominous voiceover in the opening scene of the movie trailer for Transformers – the latest movie produced by Stephen Spielberg. When we at Safe first heard about this movie, we wondered which of the 271 transformers that we shipped with FME 2007 would be featured. Would old favorites like the Tester and Grepper be awarded leading roles, or would some of the new upstarts like the RasterMosaicker or CurveFitter get the marquee position? We expect the Terminator to at least get a cameo. Since the movie opens in North American theatres today, you can be sure there will be some Safers lining up at the box office to find out firsthand!

In all seriousness though, as a Safe blogger, today's opening of the Transformers movie gives us a great opportunity to reflect on the importance of the transformer concept to our FME technology. A key benefit of FME lies in its ability to transform data from any original data model to any desired data model. The backdrop to Safe's own unique transformer story is, of course, that FME can deal with translating data between formats - over 191 formats are supported in FME 2007. But if FME simply changed formats only, our product would have attracted only a very small audience, and would have had little chance of becoming a block-buster hit.

The opening scene of our own transformer story has Don and I heading off on our first trip to Europe together. We knew we would face a problem with the configuration of the plugs for the various electrical appliances we had brought with us from North America - a common travelers' "format dilemma."

Somewhat naively, we ventured down to the local electronics store and bought ourselves a bag of plastic adapters that would allow us to plug the cords of our North American appliances into European sockets. As simply as that, our "format" problem was solved. But when I nonchanlantly turned on my electric shaver, it took on a life of its own and nearly removed my nose in the process. (I've heard, but can't say from firsthand experience, that curling irons can be similarly super-energized for the task at hand, becoming more suitable as fire starters than curling irons.) In any event, the experience provided a dramatic illustration of what can happen if the secondary problem of the data model – which in this example is equivalent to the voltage problem – is not addressed as well. When it comes to transforming spatial data, the format issue (plug/socket) must be solved, but addressing the format issue alone is nowhere near adequate if you want good results.

Enter FME transformers – the heroic characters in our story that "save the day" for thousands of FME users as they need to move data from A to B. With the help of FME transformers, users are not only changing the data format, but also modifying the data model so that the final data is in an optimal form for decision-making and further analysis.

Like the Transformer's in Spielberg's movie, our transformers have their own legend behind their origin. Many FMEers may be surprised to learn that transformers were not part of the original FME design. In the beginning, FME included readers, writers, and functions (which operated on only one feature at a time). Mashers came later, and were an ill-fated and short-lived attempt at operating on multiple features. Unredeemable, despite their great name, they were ultimately replaced by factories.
In the early days, these readers, writers, functions, mashers, and factories were all configured through an ASCII script, called a mapping file. If you attended an early FME training course, you will recall learning how an FME feature walked its way through functions and factories as it made its way from a reader to a writer.

When we decided to add a graphical interface for FME and began work on FME Workbench, we decided to model things in exactly the same way - with functions and factories. Well, here's what FME Workbench looked like in January of 2000:

Our first release didn't exactly get rave reviews. Here's a sample of some of the early feedback:

Having known the control/mapping file since 1996 I don’t feel comfortable with the style of the graphic interface …. I could stand that but this interface doesn't make it easier to make and/or understand translations. It is an interface done by hackers…

Ouch! Then came the turning point: our chief scientist, Dr. Kevin Wiebe, pointed out that, from a user's point of view, what we were doing was transforming data as it moved from source to destination. The concept of an FME transformer was thus invented. Transformers were created that could be placed in Workbench to represent the internal functions and factories of FME. The result was a drastically more comfortable and natural experience within our FME Workbench environment. The new transformers also helped to focus our messaging on the transformative power of FME. Around this time Tony Baker of Pentire Consulting pointed out that what we really had in FME was a spatial Extract/Transform/Load (ETL) tool, and this has also become a key part of our message for the past several years.

FME now has a vast array of transformers, and we've recently put together our own Transformers poster. Admittedly it hasn't got the same showbiz glitz and glamour as some of the promotional posters I've seen for the Transformers movie, but it will help you to quickly locate the transformers you need for the task at hand. (If you'd like your own ready-made copy of our transformers poster, consider attending the FME Worldwide User Conference next March - I have it on pretty good authority that they'll be one of the giveaways).

And although they're not as riveting as giant unfolding robots, our FME transformers do have one advantage over Spielberg's Transformers - they can be connected together in literally millions of different ways. By joining FME transformers together, our users have created data transformations that overcome all kinds of seemingly impossible challenges. Customers have sent us amazingly complex workspaces that solve incredibly important and difficult problems. And on the lighter side, we've also seen artwork created from ingenious transformer combinations, and also games such as Battleship and Chess.

Yes, you really can say that when it comes to the transformers of FME, they really do offer "more than meets the eye." Not only are they a natural user-level abstraction on top of the FME internal primitives of functions and factories, but they also provide the necessary building blocks that allow our users to quickly, easily, and with at least some amount of fun, solve problems in a fraction of the time required by any other approach. They are like nothing you've ever seen, and they've come to take over the planet-wide transformation of spatial data…

The current FME Workbench interface, with seven transformers placed on the workspace canvas (on the green and brown background)

Embracing Unicode - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BOM

2007-06-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz

Years ago I used to be afraid - really afraid - of multi-byte character sets. I mean, living here in North America, we have it pretty easy with just 26 characters of the alphabet to deal with. Throw in an uppercase version of each - that makes 52 characters. Add in the numbers 0 to 9, and a set of control characters, and we’re up to 88. Toss in some punctuation, and we still barely even come close to using up 127 characters. So a whole byte per character would seem like lots of room.

But the truth is, it’s a big world out there. I remember, years ago, occasionally bumping into French diacritical characters (an accented e, or c with a tail on it) and having to address the problems that even these very minimal variations used to cause. And I can remember being mildly fearful when some European friends told me they had built a codepage converter to deal with the conflicting ways certain special European characters were represented from country to country.

Character encoding made me nervous because I never fully understood what was going on. I mean, there's no course at any of our local universities that addresses this (and there should be). But fortunately, years ago I had a personal epiphany when I was lucky enough to discover an article by Joel Spolsky. I consider this article to be the definitive tutorial for understanding issues around character encodings, and it's now required reading for all new developers at Safe. In fact, if you haven’t understood much of this posting so far, I recommend that you at least browse the article before reading further.

How is my “rant” so far related to FME? Well, for the most part, inside of FME we try not to interpret the actual data we are moving around unless we actually have to. And so, years ago, we made sure that no matter what kind of characters were thrown at FME, we could ferry them through from beginning to end without causing any problems. As long as you wanted to preserve the source data exactly in your output format, we could do it. That is to say, the output format would carry the exact bit patterns of the characters as in the source format. In other words, we would preserve the original character encoding.

Most of the time, this is more than good enough. But, not only is it a big world out there, it's also a changing world. And, it's a world that is growing smaller in some respects each and every day. So today it's not unusual to receive data in, for example, an Asian character set, and be asked to integrate it with data in a Russian character set, while using a computer with North American language settings. The reason this is even possible is that some of the most modern formats include encoding information right in them. For GIS professionals, this is not unlike the issue of coordinate systems. Most, if not all, modern data formats include some notion of a coordinate system together with the data; but there is a pile of data out there that has no coordinate system with it at all. As a user, you must know what the coordinate system is. In just the same way, most file formats today still don't carry with them a notion of character set encoding; you have to know, a priori, what encoding is used. The good news is that the encoding used is almost always the same as the encoding your computer is using.

Getting back to the issue at hand, honoring character encoding information is the responsible thing to do if you're given it. And it's also responsible to utilize the ability of an output format to have its character encoding explicitly be set, and then utilized. So, if you know you've been given a CAD drawing where the annotation is stored as Unicode multibyte characters, and you're going to an XML-based format that can also support a Unicode encoding, you'd better do your best to precisely express the original data in the output format. Our latest release, FME 2007, now has this capability.

Although we're tremendously excited about this enhanced support for character encoding, the reality is that most of our users won't find it terribly relevant; this is because they're working exclusively with information from their own locale. But for other users who are working with information from multiple locales, this will be big news.

This brings me around to the title of my posting. With all the different character encodings out there, a format that wants to be aware of its encoding must employ some mechanism for expressing exactly which encoding is used. Some formats simply specify that they will use Unicode within their documentation, and then the issue is resolved, because everything can be expressed in Unicode. For other formats, the issue is more complex. Shape files can use the mechanisms built into the old DBF attribute file format, and when this can't express the encoding, they might use a companion file that contains the encoding. XML files have the luxury of just expressing the encoding right at the top of the file. But what about text files and CSV files? At first, it would appear that there is no obvious mechanism that allows them to store their encoding information. Enter the Byte Order Marker, or BOM. The BOM, simply stated, is just is a convention that uses the first few bytes in a text file to signify if and what Unicode encoding was used for that text file.

So, given the title of this blog post, and this long posting, it will not come as a surprise to you that we now fully support the BOM in FME 2007. Of course, this entry's title is alluding to the subtitle of the movie Doctor Strangelove. (It's likely you've never heard of of this movie – it was released in 1964! However, many consider it to be Peter Seller's best work, as he plays multiple characters in a single scene.)

All that aside, it feels great to finally have slayed the Dragon that is character encodings in FME 2007. I know of several clients that have already produced amazing data integrations using FME, combining data from all kinds of encodings together into a unified output - something that could never even have been imagined only a few years ago.

And the even better news is that with this new support, FME is well positioned to integrate Klingon geographical data together with Vulcan Science Council interstellar survey results into the master Federation database. Oh, you've never heard of Klingon either? Well, there was this TV show that ran about 40 years ago called Star Trek and in it...)

Live Long and Prosper

GeoTec 2007 Musings: From the Old to the New

2007-05-23T10:40:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz

A few folks such as Jason Birch and SlashGeo have been posting interesting remarks about the GeoTec conference last week in Calgary, and in particular, Ed Parson’s keynote (presented using Keynote!) on neogeography. I also really enjoyed Ed's presentation and thought that he dispensed a great deal of geo-wisdom to the crowd.

The panel discussion which followed was also enlightening and at times, entertaining (even if I was too chicken to stand up and publicly ask why Ed didn't explicitly put GML on his slide that listed format progression over time, with the traditional CAD formats on the left migrating through to KML and GeoRSS on the right).

But the thing that I thought was the most serendipitous was the store that I walked past just minutes before the keynote on my way back from my daily “when-in-Calgary” Jugo Juice run. Without trying to be too "on task", I had used Google maps/search on my Treo 650 to help me locate the nearest Jugo Juice – a perfect example of the location-based services that have been talked about for years at GIS shows and are now being used without even giving them a second thought. (Grizzled veterans may remember many OGC-type talks over the years that typically revolved around finding the closest pizza parlor; perhaps finding the closest juice stop is a bit more West Coast).

So there I was, casually using neogeography, on my way to hear a talk about neogeography. And that's when I walked by the Map World store. There it was - a whole store dedicated to globes and maps, both very very old and very very new.

Like Jason, back at the show I also talked with some folks who weren't necessarily too enthused about the whole world of neogeography. I remain convinced that neogeography and formats like KML and GeoRSS and maybe even geoJSON (pronounced geo-Jason, which I'm convinced is Jason Birch’s superhero alter ego) are extremely important and will receive widespread usage. In fact, this is happening already. In our labs at Safe, we’ve been playing around with using our soon to be re-released FME Server technology to integrate and publish spatial data “live” in KML and GeoRSS. Watch for more announcements about that soon…

But does this mean that what we traditionally think of as the domain of the GIS professional is going to wither up and disappear? Not at all. Some, even most, GIS professionals will really never have any use for any of these new formats in their daily working lives. But that's just the point. These formats aren't really for GIS professionals at all; they are for the 5.9 billion other people in the world that don't know or care about what GIS is. But in no way does this diminish the importance of what GIS people do. In fact, it makes it much more important, because the data, analysis and work of the GIS industry now has a conduit to a significantly wider audience than it ever had before.

This brings us back to the store that I had walked by before the keynote. Just because we have all these fancy new ways of distributing maps and looking at our world does not in any way diminish the value of the traditional physical "old school" maps and globes that we've had for several hundred years now. In fact, a store can still make a go of it in downtown Calgary by selling these things - just a few feet away from a conference where the latest developments in online mapping were being discussed. And right beside the sidewalk where people were scurrying about looking at maps on their handheld phones that guide them to their breakfast locations.

The old definitely has a place, an important place, and one that isn't going to go away. I think it’s very exciting to be living in an era when the new, with its much different mass market focus, is washing in all around us.

Map World storefront in Calgary, Alberta

Calgary FME User Conference and GeoTec Spatial Data Workshop

2007-04-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

- Two Opportunities to Improve your Spatial Data Pipeline

- Posted by Dale Lutz

GeoTec 2007 is fast approaching (May 14-17), and is hosted this year in Calgary, the centre of western Canada's oil patch. Given the location, GeoTec 2007 should draw a record number of attendees from the oil and gas industry - an industry that invests significant resources to reduce losses caused by structural weaknesses in oil or gas pipelines.

If you work with spatial data and you're in the Calgary area for GeoTec, I hope you'll join me for two complimentary events that offer you the opportunity to do a "structural integrity check" of your data transfer "pipeline."

(For those unfamiliar with Safe Software, our FME platform for spatial data translation and transformation provides tools that enable lossless sharing of spatial data in diverse data models and over 190 supported GIS, CAD, raster and database formats.)

On the morning of May 14, I'll be hosting a half-day FME user conference at the Calgary Fairmont Hotel. In the afternoon, GeoTec and I will co-host a spatial data workshop at the Trade and Convention Centre. Both events are complimentary, and we welcome your attendance and participation. Let us know if you’d like to present a user case study at the FME Conference. I've included more info on these events below.

On day three of GeoTec (Wednesday May 16th), you’ll also want to catch an integrated case study I'll be moderating. (Yes, it's going to be a busy week!) The case study includes presentations by Bryan Waller of Midwest Surveys and Mark Dumka, of Talisman Energy. Bryan's presentation will describe how Midwest Surveys employed FME to integrate untapped legacy CAD data into their daily operations, and their ongoing use of FME to share CAD data with diverse layering schemas via a central storehouse. Mark will describe spatial data transformation processes enabled by FME that allow Talisman to rapidly generate current oil and gas tenure maps based on a variety of land survey systems. (Incidentally, a success story that gives a high level overview of Mark's presentation is available on our website.)

Calgary FME Regional User Conference

Monday, May 14 7:30 am to 12:30 pm

If you attended our FME User Conference in Calgary last year, you'll know I'm sincere when I say that I'm looking forward to seeing you again. I hope you'll invite interested colleagues as well. There's still a few spaces available for 5-minute "Lightning Talks," so do contact us right away if you'd like to pose a question, get help with an unwieldy workspace, or wow attendees with your FME cunning (and share your strategies in the process). Please email your idea a.s.a.p. to CalgaryFMEUC@safe.com.

You can read more details about the FME User Conference at www.safe.com/calgary2007.

GeoTec Spatial Data Workshop

Monday, May 14 1:00-5:00pm

Using our FME platform, I'll be demonstrating how spatial data in various formats can be accessed, viewed, transformed and shared. Specifically, the workshop will cover:

Spatial ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) technology
powerful RASTER functionality coming in FME 2007
cost-saving solutions for sharing and accessing spatial data from over 190 different sources
configuring Spatial ETL operations
accessing the power of Spatial ETL as web services.

The workshop will also include a problem solving session, so bring your data and FME workspace files if you wish. You'll receive a demo license and have the opportunity to try a few spatial ETL processes.

You'll find more information at www.safe.com/calgary2007.

Populating a MySQL Spatial Database with FME - and other tips available through FMEpedia

2007-04-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Catherine Wilson

As an internal writer for Safe, I have enviable access to FME gurus. But I still find I rely heavily on the digital guru of all things FME: FMEpedia. In addition to offering a compendium of helpful information, fmepedia provides us with a convenient venue to showcase our users' achievements. Take the Workspace of the Week section, for example. Don't be misled by the name - it's not limited to workspaces, and it's usually updated monthly rather than weekly. But regardless of frequency, it's always a bonus to "discover" a new posting on an outstanding use of FME. This was certainly true today, when I scrolled to the bottom of the main page…and hit pay dirt.

The current Workspace of the Week features two excellent reports by Safe Reseller Hans van der Maarel. The first describes how Hans set up and loaded a simple MySQL spatial database to store data in VPF, MapInfo MID/MIF ESRI Shape, Manifold, and other formats. In the subsequent report, Hans describes how he harnessed a Google Maps mashup as a neat interface for specifying which area FME should clip from the same database. Google Maps and FME were linked using PHP commands.

Hans' articles are available through his website at www.redgeographics.com and are linked to from fmepedia. You'll also be able to navigate to Hans' reports from the main page of www.fmepedia.com for at least another week - but don't forget to scroll down!

Washington State Transportation Framework Project (WA-Trans Project) Developing Impressive Model for GIS Data Sharing

2007-04-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Drew Rifkin, Account Manager

I'm on the road again after a brief week or so in the office following the GIS for Transportation Symposium in Nashville. While at the symposium, I was spreading the word about FME’s capability to efficiently convert data between linear referencing and segmented data models. Ironically, I find many organizations have lived with the pain of supporting data in both models independently for so long, they’ve become accustomed to it; continually creating custom conversions either in-house or hiring outside expertise is so entrenched, agencies find it hard to believe there’s a much easier alternative. We’ve just posted a new FME success story on this topic that you can check out at www.safe.com/linear_referencing.

One particularly impressive session that I managed to catch at the symposium was a joint presentation on the Washington Transportation Framework Project (WA-Trans). Spearheaded by the Washington State Department of Transportation, this multi-state collaborative pilot project aims to showcase efficiencies that can be realized by developing a well-planned GIS database for sharing and integrating statewide transportation data.

At the present time the WA-Trans partners have defined a data model, standards and system architecture, and are now testing pilot projects in the Puget Sound region with the ultimate goal of implementing the framework across the entire state of Washington.

What I find especially visionary about this project is the managers’ commitment to involve a staggering number of stakeholder groups. At the Washington State level, well over 70 partner agencies contribute to the project. Both data providers and end users are represented in this group, which includes transit agencies, freight interests, emergency services, tribal nations, environmental groups, and local and state governments, as well as federal government agencies that work with Washington State authorities. A second level of participation is the Transportation Pooled Fund Study, which involves the states of Oregon, Ohio, Tennessee, Nebraska and California. These states contribute funding and expertise in return for in-depth insight into Washington's process.

The incentive to seek multi-stakeholder participation grew out of initial work between Washington and Oregon State. Consultation with Oregon and insights gained from Oregon’s experience in developing the All-Roads Model convinced Washington DOT of the benefits of collaborating with a wide cross-section of partner groups. Benefits that evolve from this level of joint participation will be many. The project has cast the net wide with respect to involving agencies that already maintain useful data assets. As a result, data collection costs will be minimized by harvesting data that already exists, eliminating duplicate data collection efforts. Involving many of these agencies before developing the system model is also prudent insurance that the final mechanisms for sharing data across jurisdictions will be effective.

Collaboration with such a large number of end user groups also creates the optimal opportunity to develop a system that truly serves the needs of a diverse range of end user communities. Road network intelligence made available through the final transportation framework will beneficially impact road safety, private and public transportation interests, 911 emergency dispatch operations, disaster recovery planning, homeland security analysis, environmental protection and remediation, the commuting public, and a host of other agencies, many of which have neither the funding or capability to develop any significant road data on their own.

In my opinion, Washington State and all the agencies participating in the WA-Trans project are to be congratulated for their determination to work together to “do it right.” The strategy of investing the time and resources up front to involve as many potential data contributors and end users as possible is no small undertaking, but I believe the results will substantiate the merits of this approach.

This is a project well worth watching, not just for lessons already learned in terms of how to achieve buy-in from so many partner groups, but because the results so far promise a process and end result that many states across the US may soon seek to emulate.

The Morpheus Project: Can the GIS Industry be Freed From the Matrix?

2007-04-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Dale Lutz, VP Product Development

On April 4, Matteo Luccio, editor of GIS Monitor, posted an article on the Morpheus Data Transformation Project, a collaborative project between database researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Florida. The laudable goals of the project are to save programmers time by developing a searchable repository of common data transformations used to convert source data into the schema required by the destination data warehouse. Matteo's article explores whether such a resource would be useful within the GIS industry, and includes responses from four industry experts.

Recently, Matteo interviewed both myself and M.I.T. Professor Michael Stonebreaker for a follow-up article, which you can read in last week's GIS Monitor.

As stated in the original article, one of the key questions the Morpheus Project seeks to answer is whether a library of 1,0000 or so "common" GIS data transformations would be valuable. My response to this question concurs with the opinions already expressed by others already interviewed on the topic. The key word here is common. As I outlined in the interview, a "common garden variety" end-t0-end transformation would be difficult to identify in the geospatial industry. To cite one of my own quotes in the article, "an end-to-end transform is almost never re-usable between two different parties, because it's very rare that people have exactly the same data models." Any repository receiving contributions that were even minimally representative of the host of transformations being carried out daily throughout the GIS industry would quickly become extremely large. For example, Safe Software's FME platform currently enables translation between any of 190 supported formats. A repository that simply represented every possible format translation between these formats would need to support, at a minimum, 36000 different translations (190x190). And that’s not providing any other transformation of feature geometry or attributes. FME provides 280 individual data transformation options as basic building blocks that can be linked together to create much more complex transformations. Our Professional Services team, who routinely trouble-shoot data transformation tasks for Solutions Services clients and FME Yahoo! group members, claim that FME users are applying an arguably infinite number of different transformations to their geospatial data.

In my view, a complete transformation may not be an interesting unit of exchange or sharing, but instead, common sub-transformations. In FME parlance, these are the custom transformers, or groups of transformers packaged together with well-defined interfaces; practice has shown these to be much more reusable than complete end to end transformations. (Similarly, software developers typically reuse components, or objects, or libraries, but not entire programs.)

So, assuming we are talking about a collection of transformations, the question becomes not whether a such a library would be useful, but how you could search it once it became available. To me, this second question regarding searchability is much more interesting. Here at Safe, we are already debating how we can make it easier for our users to navigate through the 280 transformers that FME ships with, let alone find user-created custom transformers on our fmepedia site. I think if Morpheus can create mechanisms for easily locating relevant, reusable transformations (or sub-transformations), the results would be applicable not only to any and all ETL tools, but to the entire software industry.

I wish those involved in the Morpheus Data Transformation Project success in this endeavour, and once again complement them on their very cool project name.

Hmm…thinking about it more carefully, I wonder if there is a tie between this project and the emerging field of Neogeography…

Morpheus: I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door…

Safe Software and the Importance of Model Driven Data Translation

2007-04-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Don Murray, President

In February I had the privilege of visiting Andreas Donaubauer and his team at the Technical University of Munich. Andreas’ team is working on the the mdWFS project and tackling the difficult problem of building integrated Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) on top of heterogeneous data models. I’ve been very excited about the mdWFS project ever since I first heard about it, and it was great to discuss this work with the team in person.

Safe Software has built its business around the problem of interoperability in general, with a strong emphasis on interoperability in the geospatial context. We are the recognized industry leaders in this area and license our technology to all the major GIS vendors. The reason I’m excited about the work underway at the Munich Technical University is that they are focusing on the "semantics" of interoperability. This team understands a crucial truth that Safe Software has been preaching to the GIS community for over a decade: to provide true data interoperability, you need to solve both syntactic translation and semantic translation. In short, the research underway at the Munich Technical University is on the leading edge of geospatial interoperability.

For years, many within the GIS community have claimed that if all data was in a single format, we would have interoperability. That is, they have been hoping that syntactic translation is enough. As a result, solutions have focused on "format translation" in the belief that once this is addressed then the interoperability problem will solved. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Syntactic translation - converting data from one format to another with no other processing - is only part of the solution. With syntactic translation, the information has merely been converted "as is" to the new format. In almost all cases, format translation alone is not sufficient for effective communication of information. The second and more difficult problem of semantic translation still remains.

Semantic translation is the key to effective sharing of spatial data. Semantic translation recognizes that different end user communities have different needs, and use different terminology and data models to describe and manage their data. Semantic data translation tools allow these communities to transform both their attribute and their geometric data so that the resulting datasets are immediately meaningful and useful to each unique user community.

At Safe we have built a graphical semantic modeling tool called "FME Workbench" which enables individuals or communities to design their required data models. Workbench includes a gallery of over 270 individual “transformers” that each offer a different data transformation option. By simply dragging and dropping transformers onto the Workbench canvas, users can design data transformation workflows that create new data models - models that preserve all the information inherent in the original data. To use a simple example, source data in a model that allows the values Paved, Gravel, or Dirt for a given data field named Road Surface can rapidly be reconstructed into a new model that stores the same information in a field named Road Type, where Road Type allows only the values Asphalt and Unsealed. With this kind of capability, organizations are freed from the requirement to continually create custom solutions, or maintain data in multiple models. Instead, a single mechanism distributes or provides access to data in nearly any data model.

While Workbench is a semantic modeling tool, we have not built anything that can auto generate the semantic models. Our current state of the art requires that all mappings from different data sources be manually captured for each community either in workspaces or mapping files.

I look forward to sharing ideas and technology with the team at the Munich Technical University. Their work is important to not only the geospatial community, but to more effective information communication in general.

In Memoriam: D.I. Axel Axmann

2007-03-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

- Posted by Don Murray, President

D.I. Axel Axmann
10.03.1958 - 18.03. 2007

Last week Dale and I, and all of the Safe staff, were greatly saddened to learn of the passing of Axel Axmann, Managing Director and founder of Axmann Geoinformation, Austria. As a reseller for Safe for the past six years, Axel became not only a greatly respected business partner, but also a personal friend, and we will feel his loss in many different ways.

When Axel first contacted Safe Software in 1999, he had already developed impressive technical expertise in data translation and transformation. After evaluating a copy of FME, Axel abandoned a data transformation product he had been developing for several years, and opted instead to become an FME reseller. Axel’s skill, combined with the power of FME, provided exceptional value to his clients; Dale and I were often astounded by the ingenious ways that Axel applied FME to produce ground-breaking results. He was one of our first partners to exemplify a business model that has since been recognized by others: FME by itself can achieve results for every user, but FME in the hands of an expert can solve much more challenging problems for clients. It was easy to understand why Axel consistently ranked amongst our top performing resellers.

Axel’s enthusiasm for his work reflected a larger passion for life itself – his wonderful sense of humour endeared him to many staff here at Safe. When Dale and I first met Axel in person at the Vienna FME User Conference in September 2001, Axel had arranged for a magician to entertain us, and had obviously instructed the magician to make a few jokes focusing on us. It was great fun and Axel added his personal touch to the show by contributing a few magic tricks of his own, incorporating the theme FME is Magic. How could Dale and I not be impressed by that!

As first-time visitors to Vienna, Dale and I learned invaluable lessons from Axel’s flawless example as a conference host. Axel had the enviable ability to make everyone feel warmly welcomed, and also acted as our personal tour guide, taking great delight in introducing us to the highlights of the city. When news of the 9/11 terrorist attack reached conference attendees on the second afternoon, Axel handled our shocked group with masterful decorum, lifting our spirits by taking us all for a ride on the famous Prater Riesenrad Ferris wheel. Attendees from last year’s FME Worldwide User Conference held here in Vancouver last September were the unknowing beneficiaries of the lessons Dale and I learned from Axel’s example in Vienna. In planning the agenda, we deliberately tried to follow his formula to improve the conference experience.

Axel’s team have clearly demonstrated their ability and commitment to build on the solid foundation he established, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with Axmann Geoinformation. In addition to the company he founded, Axel leaves a legacy within FME itself: Axel’s suggestions and unique insights were a tremendous asset to us, and helped shape much of the functionality available in FME today.

It’s exactly eight years and three days since Axel first contacted Safe, and it’s been a privilege to have known him. We will greatly miss Axel - a technical expert who worked his own magic with FME, a friend whose personality charmed many, and a mentor who kept us watching him closely to learn the secrets behind the magician’s many successes.

Daylight Savings Time Transition not a Problem for FME

2007-03-01T11:43:00.000-08:00

- posted by Catherine Wilson

The transition to daylight savings time in the early spring is always welcome here in Vancouver. After several months of predominantly overcast skies and overflowing rain gauges, the promise of another hour of daylight in the evening is just as invigorating as the flowering of the first spring crocuses. Certainly no one in our offices is complaining that daylight saving is coming three weeks earlier this year.

However North America’s early transition to daylight savings time has generated a number of enquiries from FME users. For those who have been tasked with identifying software that may need updates, here’s our official statement:

FME’s performance is not affected in any way by changes in local time zones related to daylight savings, or by extensions to the number of weeks of daylight savings time, provided the operating system supports the new daylight savings time. FME obtains its daylight savings information from the host operating system.

Users running FME on a Windows operating system can easily check that the option to automatically adjust the operating system for daylight savings time has been selected. Simply double-click on the date or time in the task bar, or alternatively, open the Control Panel, select Date and Time options, then select the Time Zone tab.

As an aside, here’s our unofficial statement:

FME’s performance should not be affected by the new date for initiating daylight savings time in North America. However, performance of individual users may improve noticeably. FME users in the northern hemisphere may experience increased energy levels, a more positive outlook, and a sudden urge to plan summer vacations.

March 11 can’t come soon enough.

The Skinny on FME's GeoRSS Support

2007-02-06T12:33:00.000-08:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Not that long ago, I was convinced RSS feeds were the last thing I needed. As someone who receives volumes of content daily via e-mail, I wasn't eager to adopt a technology that would send even more content my way via yet another mechanism. But the past year or so has made me a true believer in the utility and potential of RSS feeds. There’s now a ton of important information being posted in blogs - industry information that I need to keep up with. Becoming at least minimally competent at making use of RSS feeds, aggregators, and the like has been a very worthwhile investment.

Depending on who you ask, RSS stands either for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, and was developed primarily to advertise website changes to interested parties. When combined with appropriate aggregation software, RSS feeds make it possible to keep your finger on the pulse of dozens of different websites without having to continually revisit each one. For me personally, discovering the FeedBlitz website has been a tremendous timesaver. Each day FeedBlitz collates updates to RSS feeds published by the sites I'm interested in and delivers the whole caboodle in a single e-mail that I can process during my daily news review. (If you’re interested, some useful background information on RSS feeds is available here.)

While discussing RSS, I should clarify an issue that often confuses folks. An RSS feed really is just an XML file. That's it - pure and simple. That XML file may be generated on-the-fly by a server and sent down to your web browser when you make the request, or it might be nothing more than a “file waiting” that is served up by a web server in exactly the same way as any other HTML file might be. So there's nothing really magical about a feed per se: it's really just a file that has either been prepared ahead of time, or is generated only when you ask for it.

Considering the utility of RSS, it's no wonder people soon started slipping location information into these web feeds. Suddenly we had GeoRSS - a fantastically simple and powerful way of disseminating not only information about events of interest, but also their location. The web’s equivalent of the newspaper boy yelling headlines in the street suddenly had a doctorate in geography and could tell you exactly where an event was taking place.

Despite my enthusiasm for web feeds and GeoRSS, early research into supporting both RSS and GeoRSS showed that this would involve a considerable amount of work. RSS/GeoRSS-enabling FME involved supporting something like nine different variants. Before location-enabled web feeds existed, there was already an RSS standard, and the competing Atom standard. And since both of these have been developing very quickly, a few versions of each are in use. Enter location. There are three different but commonly-used ways of inserting location into a web feed. There's the W3C Geo way, which merely adds a point value defined by lat/long coordinates into the XML file; then there's the "Simple" way, which accepts a handful of simply-structured geometries; and then there's the fully-dressed "GML" way which allows full-blown GML geometries in any coordinate system. To support all of these, we had to support each way of expresssing geometry in each of the web feed standards, for several of the versions of those standards. Both with and without spatial information. A great task for Safe’s co-op students, if I ever saw one!

Largely thanks to the efforts of our last group of co-op students, we were able to announce today that FME 2007 will support RSS and Atom feeds – including those without location data - as well as all variants of GeoRSS. (You can read today’s press release here, and there’s more information about FME’s GeoRSS support on our website.)

In any event, we’re excited to support this latest spatial format. There's no question that it's way cool to be able to view up-to-the-minute maps showing earthquake locations worldwide, and road rage hotspots indicated by bumper-to-bumper traffic in New York - all displayed on the computer in your office. But it's going to be even more fascinating to see how GeoRSS gets mashed up into Web 2.0 applications which will be run on handheld mobile devices by both consumers and field workers of all kinds - providing a vehicle for greatly improving awareness, and reaction times when it comes to breaking news of any sort.

And that's why I'm so excited about this new ability to write GeoRSS with FME. FME makes it pretty darn easy to take just about any kind of spatial data and produce a GeoRSS file, then place it on a website. Because FME can easily be run in a batch mode, it doesn't take much imagination at all to envisage how you could set up FME to refresh your “feed” every 20 minutes by just creating and outputting a new file to replace your previous one. And here's a preview of something we'll be talking more about in the weeks to come - in our labs here we have a powerful FME-based GeoRSS server that creates GeoRSS "feeds" on demand by simply running workspaces that output to the GeoRSS format.

Here at Safe we're already using FME to create a GeoRSS feed to publicize upcoming FME training courses in various locations around the world. You can view the results, displayed on two mashups we put together with Google Maps here and here. If you’re interested, the GeoRSS feed of FME training locations, as well as links to a number of other available GeoRSS feeds, are available on our website. Incidentally, we’d like to build our web page of GeoRSS feeds into a comprehensive resource for FME users, so if you come across an interesting GeoRSS feed, please send the URL to us at info@safe.com.

By the way, all that I’ve just said about GeoRSS is also true about traditional (non-spatial) RSS – FME can also be used to create and consume these too, and I’m sure some will find uses for that as well.

It’s always fun to be part of something big, and I know that when ingenious FME users get their hands on the ability to easily create targeted, focused GeoRSS from any kind of spatial and attribute data, they will be putting up all sorts of interesting information and making it available to who-knows-what applications to utilize in who-knows-what ways. I for one can't wait.

The screenshot above shows information obtained from a GeoRSS feed provided by the USGS. Each histogram represents the location of a recent earthquake, with magnitude indicated by the height of the histogram. The GeoRSS feed was transformed into a KML file in FME's Workbench application, then visualized in Google Earth.

FME as a Spatial Intelligence Tool for Smallworld Data

2007-01-22T13:29:00.000-08:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Alfred Sawatzky recently posted a very insightful article on his SworldWatch blog discussing the benefits of using FME as a tool to extract and transform information from a SmallWorld database for later visualization and analysis. As I commented following Alfred’s post, even though FME is our own tool, we’re still discovering an amazing variety of uses for it. In the past year we've begun using FME in-house to query our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) information, "spatialize" the data, and then visualize it using tools like Google Earth. (I've also used FME to build a catalog of all our FME source code change comments, and years ago we migrated CRM and later accounting systems using FME as the data pump.)

We’ve found that using FME’s graphical tools to do the configuration is always a better option than writing special code to manipulate data. FME provides three key advantages, which I will summarize quickly in the remainder of this post.

First of all, using FME’s drag-and-drop Workbench environment is far more efficient than creating source code.

Secondly, maintaining a properly structured and documented Workbench workspace should be easier than maintaining a block of source code to do the same thing; since the user is working at a much higher level of abstraction with Workbench, there should be fewer entities to work with. (I know it's possible to create nearly unmaintainable workspaces with Workbench, but you’ll end up with unmaintainable source code far more quickly. Trust me - I've seen both.)

Thirdly, as Alfred points out, once you've got the transformation set up in Workbench, it’s very easy to leverage your effort by outputting the results in a wide variety of ways. In Alfred’s example, once he had created a CSV file it took very little effort, in fact nearly none, to output the same information as a KML file for use in a visualization tool. As my good friend Don Murray often says, With FME, format is irrelevant. Once you’ve designed your transformation, outputting your results to more than one format for use in multiple and possibly very different applications, is nearly trivial.

Anyway, thanks once again, Alfred, for the posting and the insights.

News From the Capital

2007-01-18T23:19:00.000-08:00

- posted by Don Murray, President

I’m back in snow-blanketed Vancouver after spending a week in warmer temperatures in Washington DC, where I attended the ESRI Federal User Conference. The weather is truly weird this winter - usually Vancouver is warm (albeit rainy) and Washington is cold and snowy! The conference itself was great and gave Craig (Director of Sales) and me the opportunity to meet with existing clients and many new prospects. We met with folks from US Census, Adobe, SAIC, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), Lockheed Martin, IBM, NOAA, and a number of other agencies.

Federal agencies are actively seeking ways to exchange spatial data more efficiently, and Craig and I seemed to be on the same page with everyone we met. In one meeting I said, partly joking, “The FME server has an SOA for your ESB.” Everyone present not only instantly understood what I had said, but also became very excited when they heard details about our upcoming FME Spatial ETL Server.

(SOA = Service Oriented Architecture and ESB = Enterprise Service Bus)

This interest in our Spatial ETL Server is spurred by a joint initiative involving various federal departments that aims to build a nationwide data infrastructure ESB not unlike Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) projects in other countries. Such a system would provide enormous value during disasters similar to Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. The idea is to define a model for all data that travels over the ESB. Organizations wanting to publish data to the ESB would transform the data from their internal system and data model to the XML/GML data in the ESB data model. However, the ESB data model is huge and the desired data is in a myriad of formats scattered throughout a large number of offices in the US. FME’s ability to transform data from over 180 formats offers the potential to streamline this data sharing process. Format conversion alone will not meet this need – the data model transformation capability provided by FME is integral to effective data sharing in such a system.

FME’s ability to act as a WFS client and a GeoRSS client was also a topic of great interest, since both WFS and GeoRSS are efficient means of receiving machine-readable updates on demand during emergency security and disaster scenarios.

Nearly everyone was surprised to learn that our FME SpatialDirect product for web-based data distribution is also a WFS server. This lack of awareness is our fault and we need to do more communication to get that message out. On the WFS topic, I learned that IBM now also has a WFS Server and we agreed to test FME as a client against it.

The big news about our upcoming releases of FME 2007 and SpatialDirect 2007 (which will be released almost simultaneously) is our raster support. SpatialDirect has always been a great way to distribute vector data over the web; now it also provides raster data distribution. The folks at the Arkansas Geographic Information Office have been SpatialDirect raster pioneers and their Arkansas GeoStor site (http://www.geostor.arkansas.gov/) provides a great example of a spatial data warehouse that is extremely easy for the public to access.

One of the tasks we added to our “Urgent Action Items” as a result of the Washington trip is to finish off our TIGER/GML support in time for FME 2007. Given the great interest in our Spatial ETL Server, we will also be releasing more services such as WMS, WCS, REST, and SOAP in short order. We are also looking to support WFS-T on the client side as there is more activity on this front than we have seen in the past.

A number of different groups we met with requested FME training, so we’ll be looking to host one or more training courses in Washington DC in the near future. These courses may not make it onto our list of regularly scheduled training, which is posted at www.safe.com/training, so if you are interested in attending FME Training in Washington, do contact us at sales@safe.com.

Celebrating Safe's Ten Year Partnership with the National Land Survey of Sweden, and Our Other Swedish Partners

2007-01-08T22:23:00.000-08:00

Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Today marks an important anniversary for Safe Software: it’s the tenth anniversary of our relationship with National Land Survey of Sweden - the first company outside North America to buy FME (our spatial data transformation tool).

(You can read the press release here.)

And what a great 10 years it's been! Safe first met staff from the National Land Survey (NLS) at the very first tradeshow we ever hosted a booth at - the ESRI User Conference in Palm Springs in 1996 (the last time the conference was held at this location). I clearly remember Curt Carlson stopping by our rather inauspicious booth (which we were sharing with our Swedish SDE-brothers-in-arms from LandFocus). Curt picked up a very early and unsophisticated version of our FME brochure, enquired about the price, and expressed surprise at the low cost of our software. He instantly realized that the data transformation power we were selling could provide great value.

From there, Curt's group at the National Land Survey did a very careful and thorough evaluation of “this new FME product.” At that time, there was no user interface at all for FME - unless you call a Command Line and a script a user interface. Without the later Workbench application, FME had to be configured by hand using a text editor - but it could perform a large number of different spatial data transformations once you had it configured.

In any case, NLS’s evaluation of FME went on for several months. In those days we lacked a “killer business instinct” and made little effort to move customers from evaluation to sale. Finally, in January of 1997, NLS purchased a Solaris version of FME - the first one sold outside of western Canada.

Shortly afterwards I was privileged to go to Sweden as an instructor for the first ever international FME training course, sponsored by both NLS and ESRI Sweden (our first European reseller). I had never been in Sweden before, and, to be honest, I instantly fell in love with both the country and the people. That first visit was probably the best business trip of my entire career. You just can’t top seeing a hockey game played the way hockey is supposed to be (thanks Rickard), enjoying some smoked eel (thanks Eddie), feasting on authentic Swedish meatballs (thanks Markus), having salty, mustardy herring every morning for breakfast, and snacking on some authentic Semla (thanks Curt - and Ulf too for more Semla some years later). The only thing missing was a round of “rotten herring.” (Just joking.)

The first trip was followed by more visits to Sweden for different courses, consulting, and most recently, user conferences. Safe staff have been in Sweden during huge snowstorms (riding to the site on trains filled with Swedish army officers sent to dig the place out), and seen the Gävle Christmas goat burned multiple times (though no Safers have ever committed the dastardly act). We’ve learned a lot about hospitality from our Swedish friends.

Our Swedish friends have also been the source of probably the nastiest datasets we've ever seen or dealt with - the coastlines of Sweden have been very well mapped, in copious detail. Over the years much of FME’s performance-tuning has used these coastline datasets as test cases.

Our partnership with NLS has extended into numerous other countries through international work conducted by NLS and Swedesurvey. Images NLS has sent us include snapshots of FME being run by our Swedish friends while they were seated inside yurts on the steppes of Mongolia, and snapshots taken alongside the Nile in Egypt.

Over the years, our work with NLS has expanded to include collaboration on pretty much every product and API we have. We’ve worked with NLS to add several Swedish formats into FME with the Plug-in SDK API, greatly increasing FME’s utility to their market. They’ve used our server and SpatialDirect products to streamline their internal operations and make data more accessible to their clients in a very efficient way. They’ve also used our FME Objects API to add FME functionality into their ArcCadastre product. Most recently, we’ve begun working with NLS on a new endeavour that uses our most recent extendibility APIs to include NLS’s own coordinate transformation engine as an option in FME.

Although the press release that went out today focuses specifically on our work with NLS, I also want to acknowledge the early key partnerships we had with the Swedish companies LandFocus and ESRI Sweden. We were all SDE pioneers and indeed shared the unique characteristic of having actually used an early version of ArcSDE before ESRI purchased the technology from a small US company in Bellingham, WA. Safe is greatful to LandFocus and ESRI Sweden for these early experiences, which were of great benefit to us.

More recently, SWECO has joined the list of Swedish companies with FME expertise and Ulf Mansson, a SWECO employee, has founded the whole FME Art Movement and also positioned FME as a gaming engine (at least for games like Battleship), showing the amazing ways FME technology can be used (often not for the purposes it was developed for!)

With such excellent partners in Sweden, it’s no wonder that there are more FMEs per capita in Sweden than in most other countries! We look forward to a strong ongoing relationship with our various Swedish partners. Here’s to the Swedes: SKOL!

Christmas Stocking Stuffer for FME Users – a New Transformer Quick Reference List

2006-12-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

- posted by Catherine Wilson, poem by Joy Birck

Recently our technical writing team made the mistake of leaving a copy of their new Workbench Transformer Quick-Reference Guide lying around the office, and suddenly the word was out. Staff from various departments, including sales, marketing, and support, soon began dropping by our writers’ offices pleading for a copy, undeterred by the author’s protest, “But it’s only in draft!”

Initially our writers were a bit puzzled by all the interest, pointing out that the new guide is just an update of the list that’s always been available on Safe’s website and through FME’s Help menu. Almost without fail, the standard response to this was, “Ah, but this one has pictures!” and I think that’s the key behind the appeal of this list. A text description is adequate for some transformers, but the graphics on the new list allow you to see at a glance how a given transformer will alter your data.

Given the level of interest in the Quick Reference Guide around our office, we decided to make it available to FME users at www.safe.com/transformers - just in time for Christmas! Keep in mind though that it’s just a draft; we hope to have a final version available for our FME 2007 release.

Eventually the quick reference guide will include nearly 271 transformers, and the goal is to add graphics for as many as possible. Some of the new transformers coming in FME 2007 are already listed, including:

Curvefitter
PythonCreator - creates features using a Python script
Rasterizer - converts vector features to rasters
RasterMerger - creates a single multi-banded raster from multiple single banded rasters
RasterSplitter - creates multiple single-banded rasters from an input multibanded raster.

If you’d like a more in-depth sneak peek at these new transformers, as well as other new functionality coming in FME 2007, you’ll find more info on our fmepedia page at www.safe.com/2007sneakpeek.

On a more frivolous note, if you have time on your hands over the Christmas break, check out the alternate FME splash screen challenge going on on fmepedia at the moment. My favourite so far is the FME 2007 Ralphie Edition, although this one is a close runner-up.

Since this may be the last posting for 2006, I’m closing with an insider peek into some of the goings-on in Safe’s offices. The poem was composed and circulated around Safe’s offices by Joy Birck, who is also the technical writer behind the new Transformer Quick Reference Guide and clearly has versatile talent. Enjoy!

From all of us at Safe Software,

Merry Christmas and Have a Safe Holiday Season!

A Safe Software Christmas Poem

‘Twas two weeks before Christmas Two Thousand and Six,
The wind has been blowing and there’s snow in the mix.
The Safe Santa came, and at lunchtime to boot
With a dose of good humour and a new bag of loot.

Developers are nestled all snug in their chairs
By the glow of their monitors, we know that they’re there.
They’re all faintly stirring in each little house
We know that, you see,
by the clicks of the mouse.

If you listen just right, you can hear a low hum
The machines are alive or they’re simply just numb.
The clatter of keys and the muttering, pleading,
Leads one to believe that the PRs are breeding.

When out in the hallway there arose such a clatter
They sprang from their chairs to see what was the matter.
Away to the windows they flew like a flash
But no, it was JarJar, giving out its last gasp.

Yes Safe is still growing, by leaps and by bounds,
(We judge it, you know, by the used coffee grounds.)
And if pop cans could talk, I know what they’d say
“Carry on Safers, it’s just the start of the day!”

Life was quite different in Two Thousand and One,
Things were much smaller and rules were by thumb.
E-mails were fewer and we turned out hard copy
And there are those who remember FME on a floppy.

The Sales team, Pro Services, IT and Admin
Everyone’s working and all pitching in.
HR can juggle, it’s really a feat
She can answer ten questions and not miss a beat.

Marketing pulled off the UC that day
The men in white coats almost took them away.
At the end of it all, it turned out so well
That nobody wanted to bid us farewell.

Safe Software has turned into a very tight ship
A good thing, you know, if you’re up for the trip.
And the thing of it is, this ship is on course
Dale and Don are the constants, the FME source.

I can’t think of places I’d much rather work
Where else can you find where the co-founders lurk?
If you can catch them, they’re yours, for nearly an hour,
And then they’re gone, taken, by code that’s gone sour.

Safe Software’s great and I mean what I say,
Dale and Don expect work, but also you’ll play
And you’ll hear them exclaim as they drive out of sight
“FME’s great and just wait, we’ll take flight!”

Support for French-Speaking FME Users

2006-12-12T10:43:00.000-08:00

- posted by Catherine Wilson

Today we issued a press release regarding new support coming in FME 2007 for reading and writing GeoConcept. The GeoConcept format was developed by GeoConcept SA of Paris and is used widely in France and in French-speaking regions throughout Europe.

Support for GeoConcept is just the latest in a number of initiatives Safe Software and our resellers have undertaken in the last eighteen months to better serve French-speaking FME users and the French GIS industry as a whole.

A few days ago I met with Marcel LeBlanc, Safe’s Software’s Director of Business Development. I asked him how successful these initiatives have been to date, and what they are likely to mean for the French GIS industry in the future. Marcel has an up-to-date perspective, having attended both GeoWorld Expo 2006 and ESRI France’s SIG 2006 in Paris in October.

Marcel took a tour of the Eiffel Tower
during his trip to Paris

More than 200,000,000 people
have visited the tower since it was built

Cathy: Do you think we’ll see a surge in interest in FME in France as a result of our new support for GeoConcept?

Marcel: Undoubtedly. GeoConcept and EDIGEO are two of the primary formats used in France – EDIGEO being the format used by the French government for exchange of cadastral information. FME now supports both these formats; we’ve had an EDIGEO reader for over a year. But in reality, FME was already gaining popularity in France well before the announcement of our GeoConcept support. FME sales in France have increased significantly in the last 12 months.

Cathy: Can you identify a specific factor driving this increased adoption of FME?

Marcel: What has really helped increase our exposure in France is the joint effort Safe Software and our French resellers have made to educate potential users about FME. In the last year, the news that FME is now available in a French interface has sparked a great deal of interest. Now that the language barrier has been removed, I think the word is spreading amongst French GIS users that FME is a great tool, and this group has discovered a wide array of spatial data transformation functionality within FME that they can use.

Cathy: You attended both GeoWorld Expo 2006 and the ESRI User Conference in France recently. How would you describe the level of awareness of Safe Software and FME amongst the participants?

Marcel: These two events attract different groups of attendees. Safe Software and our FME products are quite well known amongst users of ESRI’s GIS products. During their presentation on the Data Interoperability extension, ESRI acknowledged Safe Software as the technology provider behind this extension. In terms of our profile at GeoWorld Expo 2006, we are very much the new kids on the block. However, FME’s support for reading and writing GeoConcept was positioned front and centre in the keynote address, and this generated a lot of interest. As a result, we had steady traffic at our booth.

Cathy: What topics seemed to capture the attention of attendees at these two conferences?

Marcel: There is growing interest in web-based data distribution, particularly as a means to allow access to data held by public sector agencies and governments. Solutions like FME that offer data interoperability across many different GIS platforms and web-based data exchange are in demand. In France and Europe there is also a greater willingness to embrace open source technology, when compared with the North America, which makes interoperability tools even more important in the European market.

Cathy: Given the increasing popularity of FME in France, does Safe have any plans to add more support specifically for French-speaking users?

Marcel: In the short term, FME users can expect to see increased opportunities for FME training and support through our expanding partner and user base within France. As well, Safe Software has begun monitoring an online forum for French-speaking FME users available through GeoRezo.net, a portal for the French GIS industry. Our French-speaking staff will contribute technical advice as needed.

Cathy: You’ve attended many conferences of this type. Were there any aspects of these two conferences that made them particularly memorable, perhaps on a more personal level?

Marcel: I’m originally from Montreal, Quebec, and during both conferences I met a large number of people working in the French GIS industry who studied at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), which offers a world-leading GIS program. It was a pleasant surprise to meet so many people in France with whom I could reminisce about my home city and swap opinions on the best restaurants in Montreal.

Cathy: So which restaurants would you recommend to GIS students studying in Montreal right now?

Marcel: <laughs> If in Montreal, you can’t go wrong visiting the Prince Arthur and St Laurent Street area. Lots of great choices!

Safe’s Antiquities Go On the Block

2006-12-04T09:35:00.000-08:00

- posted by Catherine Wilson

‘Tis the season to be either buying or selling it seems, and last Friday Safe staff did a little of both during our annual auction of surplus computer hardware. Some of the items offered for sale evoked fiercely competitive bidding; other “collector’s items” were hastily shunted off to the first person who raised their hand – even to scratch their head.

Here’s the final bid price for a few of the 35 items that were sold:

“Telek” – A Dimension 2350 – Celeron 2Ghz computer with 1G ram, CD-ROM, 30 G disk, XP. Telek was my old machine, and I was pleased to see it fetch the highest bid at the auction: a whopping $185 CDN. Perhaps this was because it was billed as having “one lady driver.”

“Daxy” – P2 300 MHz, 256Mram, CD-ROM, 8G and 20G disks.
Sold for $4 CDN, but only because it was guaranteed to heat an office to 20°C in under 15 minutes.

win2kpptp – This machine was reported to have some smoke damage…and further questioning established that it was also the source of the smoke. But it did sell…for 25 cents. Apparently it had “organ donor” printed in red on its driver’s license.

iMAC – Sold for $100. The OS was still in bubble wrap, and the purchaser confessed that they couldn’t turn down that kind of MacIntosh quality.

Fast Wide SCSI Dat tape drive – The bidding frenzy ended at 25 cents.

Twenty-four 128 megabyte RAM sticks went under the hammer for a mere $1-$2 each. The auctioneer promoted these as nice stocking stuffers, but if the buyers were only willing to pay that much for the sticks, I doubt they’ll shell out for the stockings.

Wireless mouse - sold for $21, despite its tendency to wander off the desktop in search of cheese. Probably the PR campaign helped: its roaming habit was billed as an asset during PowerPoint presentations, since the cursor was guaranteed to automatically leave the screen. The drift rate was rumored to be OS specific.

MacIntosh Performa 5260 CD PowerPC-based Mac 603e 100 Mhz, 32 Meg RAM, MacOS 8.6 – The main selling point for this machine seemed to be that it could also be turned on and off with a Sony TV remote control, although the single mouse button was also reported to be hot with folk-art collectors.

Somehow a Denon 2-channel stereo amplifier, a stepladder, and two suitcases snuck into the auction as well. Rumor has it they were bought as a package deal by a programmer in mid-life crisis who plans to take his garage-based band on the road.

All up, the auction fetched a grand total of $1,236 CDN, a 20% increase over the $1,000 raised last year. Like last year, we’ll be donating the proceeds to Covenant House, a charity based here in Vancouver that provides shelter, food, clothing and counseling to street youth.

‘Tis the season for giving too.

Safe Software at Autodesk University 2006

2006-11-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

Just a quick posting to let you know that Safe Software staff will be exhibiting at Autodesk University 2006 in Las Vegas this week (November 28 - December 1).

If you are planning to attend, please stop by our booth (#203).

Fil, Miles, and Dave from Safe will be demonstrating new technology coming in FME 2007 that will allow Autodesk MapGuide 2007 and Autodesk Map 3D 2007 to directly read over 100 additional vector formats.

What's particularly cool is that the Custom Formats feature of FME, which allows FME's Workbench transformations to be applied to data as it is read, can be used with the FME FDO provider. Using a Custom Format ensures that when data shows up inside Map or MapGuide, it's in exactly the desired data model, without the user ever needing to create a new, translated file.

I've also heard a rumour that Jason Birch - winner of the FME Idol competition held during our recent FME Worldwide User Conference - will be presenting at Autodesk U and may stop by the Safe booth to sign autographs and talk things FME.

So please stop by if you can - we look forward to hearing about your latest adventures with FME, or helping you trouble-shoot your spatial data challenges!

GIS Day Open House

2006-11-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

- posted by Don Murray, President

Every year when GIS Day rolls around, it always seems a little pretentious to announce that we are holding an Open House, since, well, we don’t make a GIS and we know that Safe Software’s role in the GIS industry doesn't seem to carry with it a lot of glamour and glitz. Geographic Information Systems with sophisticated viewer applications that can wow their audience with graphic flood or wildfire simulations tend to take centre-stage in the public imagination. But the truth is, FME plays an important, if somewhat "behind the scenes" role in the industry – a role more akin to the script prompter who stands in the wings, helping those in the glare of the spotlight deliver a flawless performance. With our technology on board, providing data translation into over 170 formats and the ability to restructure the schema of spatial data, GIS applications are ready to consume or output almost any kind of spatial data. You could say that FME’s “prompting” enables these applications to cope with last-minute script changes and deliver their performance in any required “language.”

Fortunately for us, most of the leading actors in the industry appreciate the value of having a “script prompter” they can rely on, which is why FME not only exists as a stand-alone product, but is also embedded in five top-selling GIS applications. More recently, FME technology has also been adopted by users of Oracle® and Microsoft® databases to help incorporate spatial data into what were traditionally non-spatial databases.

Knowing that our technology plays a critical role for these leading players makes us bold enough to throw open the doors on GIS Day and unashamedly “take our bow onstage.” As an added encouragement, our Open House guests seemed quick to grasp the value of FME’s contribution to the industry. Dan Olson, one of 28 visitors who dropped by for our Open House, pointed out that data integration technology such as ours could have made a difference to him in the newspaper industry fifteen years ago, (two years before Safe Software was established). At that time, Dan was tasked with integrating newspaper delivery routes for various areas of the Lower Mainland of Vancouver, BC. The route maps existed in several different GIS systems, and since there was no way to effectively integrate this data, Dan had to “start over” by redrawing the maps within a single application.

It was, in fact, exactly this kind of application that formed the basis of some of our early work for BC Hydro. And with strong winds and heavy rain buffeting our offices, as well as reports of power outages coming in from various regions of the greater Vancouver area, it seemed an especially apt example to use at the Open House to illustrate an important application of FME. This power utility, at that time, had extensive maps (in CAD files) showing the locations of power lines throughout Vancouver, but wanted to migrate this information into a single GIS system. FME was able to integrate the legacy map data into a state-of-the-art GIS system, allowing BC Hydro to make intelligent, predictive use of their maps. For example, if a tree fall brought down power lines, BC Hydro could now not only pinpoint the location of the break, but also determine how to re-route power to the affected area. Moving forward to a more recent example, our Open House presentation also touched briefly on work by a department of the US government which is currently using FME to integrate disparate maps that show air quality, water bodies, and land topology for heavily polluted areas that have been designated as priority regions for environmental remediation so that better decisions can be made.

No Safe Software information session would be complete without at least one demonstration from Dmitri Bagh, our official in-house FME Experimenter who comes up with all kinds of neat ways to use FME. For the Open House, Dmitri demonstrated some work he has been doing related to reprojecting TIFF images from one Swedish projection to another Swedish projection not supported by FME. After adding the new projection specifications to FME, Dmitri checked his results by translating the output to KML, then overlaying the resulting image onto the same region in Google Earth™. This allowed Dmitri to determine whether his reprojection results were distorted, or correctly matched Google Earth’s underlying image. And the conclusion…obvious landscape features such as highways directly overlaid each other, indicating a perfect match. Interestingly, Dmitri also noted that our recent reprojection engine upgrades meant that this reprojection task was now 20 times faster with the latest FME 2007 beta, as compared with FME 2006 GB. (In addition, the demo was an effective illustration of how FME can be used to overlay higher resolution data or custom maps over top of Google Earth imagery.)

For an encore, Dmitri then demonstrated the use of FME to calculate the relative height of buildings that had been overlaid on a new model – which in this case was Google Earth. Dmitri began the demo by showing the effect of using absolute height above sea level for buildings overlaid on a Google Earth image of a city in Texas: what should have been single family dwellings instead resembled skyscrapers. To instead calculate a relative height for the buildings, Dmitri began by finding the correlation between the land elevation and the buildings. After building a triangular irregular network (TIN) model from digital elevation model (DEM) data for the region, Dmitri extracted the minimum values of the TIN triangles, then overlaid the resulting model on the buildings. Where a TIN triangle intersected a building, Dmitri transferred the minimum Z value from the TIN triangle to the building. Each building then had two elevation attributes – the Z value (height above sea level) of the building and the Z value (height above sea level) of the ground. By subtracting the Z value of the ground from the Z value of the building, Dmitri was able to determine a height for each building relative to the ground surface.

A special benefit of GIS Day this year was the opportunity for our staff to wander just down the hall and visit Dudley Thompson Mapping Corporation’s GIS Day Open House. This newly-established company, which moved into the building a few months ago, generates vector-based maps from aerial photography using photogrammetry. For Safers, the visit provided a helpful glimpse into the painstaking work that goes into creating the data that we work with on a day-to-day basis. Dudley Thompson Mapping staff already have some experience with FME, specifically in using FME for quality assurance for province-wide 1:20,000 scale base maps created under the TRIM project for the Provincial Government of BC. It’s exciting to have a mapping company just down the hall, and we look forward to finding more ways that FME can make their tasks easier.

Last, but not least, GIS Day seemed like an auspicious occasion to officially launch our Safe Software blog. So if you are reading this post as a result of the email you received from us on GIS Day regarding the blog, welcome and thanks for visiting our blog site!

INTERGEO 2006

2006-11-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

- posted by Dean Hintz and Catherine Wilson

This posting is a bit after-the-fact, but Safe staff did attend INTERGEO 2006, in Munich, in early October. When I say "attend," I’m not talking passes to sit in a comfy chair and listen to presentations - for Krista and Dean, INTERGEO meant three days on the tradeshow floor, making frequent mental notes to write “rearrange booth so we can sit in chairs to host demos” at the top of their trip report.

I caught up with Dean last Tuesday and asked him about INTERGEO 2006:

Cathy: INTERGEO this year had something like 18,000 attendees at the technical sessions. Even if only half that number visited the tradeshow floor, that’s still a lot of people flowing by Safe Software’s booth. I’m interested in what the “word on the street” was from your perspective. What were the people you spoke to most interested in?

Dean: INTERGEO includes Europe’s largest tradeshow for geodesy, geo-information and land management. One of the things that makes this show unique for me, compared with many North American events, is the large number of attendees from government cadastral agencies, and the corresponding level of interest in base mapping and the fundamental processes involved with developing the underlying parcel maps. As a result, there was a lot of interest in our FME software’s ability to perform data validation. Not surprisingly, I fielded a lot of questions about managing the complex German formats for map data, particularly NAS, Germany’s evolving GML-based national standard. Questions about EDBS and GDF writing were common too, as well as enquiries about FME’s support for KML, GML, and open source formats in general. There are many jurisdictions in central Europe, so, besides interest in various national format standards, there was also a great deal of interest in FME’s ability to manage different map projections, and grid shifts. Our increased speed for raster reprojection generated a lot of interest too. I should add here that one central purpose at INTERGEO was to support our half-dozen or so European resellers and partners who attended. On the other hand, Mark and Christian from Conterra - one of our German resellers – often ended up supporting Krista and myself when we were forced to use our limited German!

Cathy: Did you come across any projects that were of special interest to you?

Dean: Yes, particularly an extensive land administration project for Bosnia, which is led by the German Development Cooperation (GTZ). The goal is to set up two prototype cadastral databases for all of Bosnia – one using proprietary solutions built on Oracle Spatial, and another based entirely on open source with PostGIS. The idea is to create two “proof-of-concept” systems, which will assist the Bosnian geodesy types to choose the appropriate system for their entire country. GTZ are using FME to generate the two systems, because FME will allow GTZ to set up the data in an Oracle database, then simply transfer over, or replicate, that data in the PostGIS database. So, essentially, FME gives GTZ a “two-for-one” advantage – they are able to build two different systems but need only invest the time and effort required to set up one system.

Cathy: What particularly impressed you in terms of trends in the industry and the role FME plays?

Dean: I was struck by the number of people who expressed interest in FME as a means of moving to generic solutions that are more open standards-based, more flexible, and easier to script or automate. Although Safe is a private company, FME seems to be regarded as an open standards approach by people looking to extract, manipulate, and load spatial data in an automated and scalable fashion. That’s the value that FME provides – we allow people to automate complex spatial data restructuring and transformation.

Cathy: What were some of the highlights of the event?

Dean: I always enjoy INTERGEO. Although we are a North American company, we’ve enjoyed long-time success in Europe, and as a result, Safe Software’s FME is well-known by the European GIS community; at INTERGEO, many people simply stop by to drop positive comments about FME. On a personal note, it was great to meet up with Brett Madsen (of Lagen Spatial, Australia), who had attended Safe’s FME Worldwide User Conference in Vancouver only a few weeks before. Only this time, Brett was wearing an enormous koala suit to promote the General Assembly of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) in Australia in 2010. Watching Brett sweat it out in his toasty koala suit made me grateful that I was only required to stand under a banner displaying our FME icons for FME 2006 GB – our cheeky gecko and a bunch of 6-foot-tall bananas! Speaking of icons and logos, I was surprised, on the day before the show, to see a huge FME logo on the side of a maintenance cart that had been left near Safe’s booth during setup. When I asked about the logo, I was told the setup guys worked for the conference and had nothing to do with us or our resellers. So if the maintenance guys at INTERGEO are into FME, I guess we really are the Swiss army knife of the GIS world.

Cathy: I hear GE Smallworld didn’t bring a karaoke machine this year. You must have missed that.

Dean: I was looking forward to it, but I think the audience had more fun watching the entire Trimble team dancing to a rapster’s beat during the evening booth party. On the other hand, Mark Döring and I did get to race the Formula One car the next day, registering top scores at the Trimble booth.

A big show such as INTERGEO calls for a big backdrop - such as 6 ft tall FME bananas.

You never know what you'll see at INTERGEO - Dean and koala bear with koala beer.

Safe Software’s Coming of Age: Reflections on our First International User’s Conference and other Milestones

2006-10-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

How does a software company determine that it’s ready to hold its first international conference? That’s not an easy question to answer, and was only the first of many we had to grapple with once we decided to take the plunge and host our first worldwide user event.

If you’re interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the planning process for what turned out to be a very successful FME Worldwide User Conference, as well as a peek at some recent FME developments, you may want to check out the discussion Don Murray and I had last week with Adena Schutzberg, Executive Editor for Directions Magazine.

The 32-minute podcast of our interview is available from the All Points Blog posting for Tuesday, October 17 at http://allpointsblog.com/archives/2006/10/17.html.

Topics covered during our discussion include:

Conference Reflections

How we determined Safe Software was ready to host an international conference
How often we’re likely to hold a similar event
How we decided where to hold the conference
Our primary goals for the conference
Our greatest paybacks from the conference
How we decided on content
Fun activities that lent additional vitality to the conference

On FME’s Maturation Over the Past 13 Years

Some surprises we received once we began collecting user statistics
FME integrations with GIS and non-GIS packages
Technology licensed from other companies for inclusion in FME, including Curvefit technology for replacing approximated or “stroked” arcs with true arcs, and MRF Clean technology for removing line overshoots and undershoots etc in 2D and 3D data
Factors contributing to Safe Software’s success over the past 13 years

GeoPlace Interview: The Shape of Safe Software's FME - New Developments, the State of Safe, and More...

2006-10-11T15:38:00.000-07:00

- posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development, Safe Software

My recent interview with Matt Ball, editor of GeoWorld, touched on some topics that might, at first glance, seem to have potentially ominous implications for Safe Software. For instance, with the number of vector, raster and database formats supported by FME already reaching around 170, surely each new format we add must bring us one step closer to the end of the road in terms of new formats to support. And one might expect that the format support provided by Autodesk’s Feature Data Objects (FDO), and the adoption of FDO by open-source players such as MapGuide, must make all of us at Safe more than a little uncomfortable...or not.

If you’d like to read the article and find out why I’m not making plans for an early retirement, you’ll find it at http://www.geoplace.com/uploads/IndustryInterview/lutz.asp. (Look for The Need to Translate Stays Steady.)

The article also touches on our motivation behind some major new developments that will be available with the release of FME 2007, including the overhaul of FME’s internal geometry model and the new Spatial ETL Server.

My Journey Towards FME

2006-10-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

- posted by Lyes Mokraoui of GIS Innovation Sdn Bhd, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

In August, our staff at GIS Innovation Sdn Bhd were proud to organize the first FME Asia Regional Conference here in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The conference was a successful and enjoyable event, with participants showing great interest in the many enhancements available in FME 2006 GB.

Preparing for the conference was an opportunity to reflect on the history of my experience with GIS products in general, and FME in particular. This posting outlines a little of this history, and explains some of the impressive capabilities of FME - capabilities that prompted me to become a reseller for Safe Software.

I began using GIS software about 14 years ago when I was still a student, with this early experience involving mapping software specializing in contouring. I was fortunate to have lecturers who not only fought to obtain new hardware for their students, but also ensured we put those 286 machines to better use than merely playing Solitaire and Prince Of Persia. At that time, the only thing close to GIS mapping was AutoCAD. As the years passed, we began to learn more about the convenience of GIS and how easily attributes could be linked to features in GIS software.

My first experience with GPS was about 10 years ago, as part of a project that involved locating potentially profitable mining locations and recording them on a map. At that time, there were no mobile GIS devices available.

I have been using ESRI technology for about 8 years now and decided to complement this work by using Safe Software's products. I have to say that Safe's products opened up tremendous possibilities in terms of data processing, manipulation and conversion. FME, or Feature Manipulation Engine, can not only read and write just about 180 formats, including GIS, CAD and database formats, but can also do a whole lot more. Besides handling one-to-one vector conversions, FME has recently been updated to support and manipulate raster image formats such as JPEG2000, MrSID, ER-Mapper, and ERDAS.

FME is becoming popular in Malaysia – I am personally aware of a number of businesses that have purchased the product to enhance their data output. Although some of the new tools are sometimes buggy (as is often the case with any new software), the Safe Software team makes a new build or beta version available every Friday and are very reliable about contacting the user when the bug has been fixed. I have also been impressed by how responsive Safe Software is to users' requirements. Of course, not all suggestions can be implemented, as this is ultimately determined by client demand and the usefulness of the request, but it seems they do strive to fulfill worthwhile requests as quickly as possible.

FME is the only software that I know of that can convert a file from CAD to GIS formats without losing attributes, and it is also the only software that I have come across that can convert to a CAD format with the annotations and text appearing properly on the resulting CAD drawing/map.

I have not personally tested all of FME's capabilities, but I would be glad to share my experience with anyone who is interested. At GIS Innovation, we continue to explore the potential of this software, and are looking forward to organizing the second FME Asia Regional Conference in 2007. We are also planning to organize more regional training sessions for users who would like to become more knowledgeable about FME.

The Fine Art of Demos

2006-10-04T16:45:00.000-07:00

- posted by Tyson H., Senior Product Specialist at Safe Software

The laptop seemed to be suspended in midair for a microsecond before it crashed to the floor, and the colour drained from my face. Every head in the room turned towards the hapless Panasonic employee who, without a doubt, would lose his job and spend the rest of his days living on the street writing AML scripts for loose change and small scraps of food…

Ok, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but that was exactly the scene that my coworker Moira and I were treated to Monday at the ESRI Regional User Conference in Victoria. But inexplicably, the Panasonic guy had a smile on his face as he retrieved the laptop from the ground. As a crowd gathered around, he announced that the laptop was fine. “Meet the new Panasonic Toughbook.”

Brilliant. This man had clearly mastered the fine art of demos. As he and his colleague discussed the merits of these nearly indestructible machines to the crowd that had rushed to his booth, I pondered the essential components of a successful demo.

First, we have the hook - something to draw the attention of the crowd. Although not all hooks are as dramatic as a falling laptop, most booths try to have something interesting to lure people in. The Cansel guys had an array of cool GPS technology, which I watched them partially disassemble at one point in the day; the Clover Point Cartographics folk had some beautiful printed examples of hill shading over contours; the ESRI tech support booth was hard to miss with a brilliant 42 bazillion-inch monitor - people gravitated towards that monitor as if its massiveness produced its own field of gravity. In addition to our usual brochures, business cards, and company newsletters, Moira and I had the advantage provided by our eye-catching interoperability movie, which gives a high-level but succinct explanation of the various benefits of spatial ETL. In addition to this, we also had the benefit of a choice booth spot due to our timely arrival. All these factors combined kept the participants flowing our way.

But beauty will only take you so far in life (or so people keep telling me), and your crowd will dissipate rapidly if your demo is all sizzle and no steak. This brings us to the next part of our demo - the pitch. Your pitch must, in ten seconds or less, explain the history of your company, the purpose of your product, and how it will make the listener’s work life easier, and possibly bring him one plane closer to true GIS Nirvana. In this regard, I am a well-oiled machine. No longer do I have to resort to spewing out acronyms and buzz-words like somebody with a high tech form of Tourette’s. Working at Safe Software, the story is simple, straight forward, and easy to explain: Spatial ETL.

So if you’ve done a good job with the pitch, and your potential customer is still within earshot, then it’s time for the part of the demo I like to call “the demo.” This is the part I struggle with. It’s not because I don’t know the software like the Cookie Monster knows cookies. I put FME on my cornflakes for breakfast (there’s a GB reference for hardcore fans). It’s also not because I have problems speaking to strangers (as my office mates, my fellow yogis, the people who work at my local Taco Del Mar, and most of the folks who ride the 324 bus to Surrey can attest to). My problem is that I have difficulty containing my excitement. But it’s pretty much impossible to hit even a quarter of FME’s functionality over an entire day of demos (trust me, I’ve tried). I’ve learned over the years to slow it down a bit and give people a chance to ask questions about particular aspects that they find relevant. Also, I like to throw out a few questions at the end and see what my audience responds to. Sometimes they’ll have specific things they would like to see, or sometimes they’ll simply have questions about general concepts. Often they just want to talk about the remodeling work they’re doing to their bathroom, which is fine with me. I’m here to listen. However, the ESRI Regional UC did give me lots of opportunity to demo some of the new and cool things coming out for ArcGIS 9.2. The integration into 9.2 is so smooth I sometimes forget what environment I’m running in!

So with the demo complete, it’s time for the wrap-up. Here’s where the deals happen. Every vendor will measure the success of the demo in a different way. Personally, if I can convince somebody to download the FME demo from our website and give them the contact info for someone who can help them, I count that as a win. I feel very fortunate to be able to demo FME, because the product is so great and so essential for many spatial data managers, it practically sells itself. But more than this, there’s another element to a successful demo that I find personally very satisfying: it’s that unique expression people get on their face when they begin to understand the potential capability of Spatial ETL. And although connecting with FME users in Victoria yesterday was as enjoyable as ever, I was especially encouraged by the number of people who “got it” for the first time - an important indicator to me that my demo has been a success. Which is a good thing - my current laptop would not survive repeated dropping onto the floor.

The Doctor is In – Answers to Questions Posed by Users at our FME Worldwide User Conference

2006-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

Would you trust a doctor with blatantly phony credentials? Luckily, participants at our recent FME Worldwide Users Conference recognized that, although the credentials advertised by our “FME doctors” were phony, the expertise behind the credentials was genuine. So they didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the free consultations offered by our FME doctors and provide a few data samples for lab analysis.

A big hint that this is not a real physician: he doesn't know how to wear a stethoscope. If he tries to use that thing, someone had better call an ambulance.
(However he is an FME expert, honest).

FME Doctors on duty at the conference included:

Curtis F. – Interopologist
Dan I. – Gastronomics
Dave C. – OB/FME
Dean H. – Raster Reprojectologist
Harbinder S. – Vectorinarian
Kevin W. – Topological Hygienist
Mark I. – Holistic Workspace Therapist
Matt A. – U-Optometrist
Ryan C. – FME GP
Ryan P. – Raster Surgeon

We figure that every question posed by an FME user at the conference probably represents at least 1,000 users out there who are wondering the same thing, so we decided to post some of the questions asked of our FME doctors here, together with Safe’s response.

(Don’t forget that you can pose your own FME-related questions online and have them answered by our staff and other FME users at www.fmepedia.com.)

Questions from the Conference

Re. the MRF Cleaner: Will you be adding support for cleaning 3D data?
Kevin: Yes, we are working on that right now and hope to have it available for the end of the month. (Editor’s note: This work has now been completed.)

Snapping: Will you be adding snapping capability, not just along the edges, but at any arbitrary place along lines?
Kevin: Our leading programmer is working on this. When will it be ready Don?
Don (Safe’s President): This has been a work in progress for a long time. For now, I’d have to say it’s ongoing.
Kevin: He always uses the excuse that he has a few other things on his plate.<laughter fills the room>
Dale: The bottom line is, this capability is now provided with the MRF Cleaner, and so we have no plans to extend our existing Snapper in FME to do arbitrary mid-line snapping.

Support for Oracle writer: Could you add the ability to update, delete per feature?
Kevin: We have added that support to all our database writers except Oracle. It’s on the docket, but no resources have been allocated to that at the moment.
Dale: FME has long had the ability to update databases in general – a lot of people don’t know FME can do that. But exactly how it worked varied from one database writer to another. We now have a generic way of doing that. Basically, all the database writers will behave in the same way. We have a mechanism that’s been specified that all database writers will honour; we will have a transformer where you can set some attributes, and it will work on all the databases. We would like to get away from having every individual writer having a different way of doing this.

Combining Raster & Vector Data/Clipping: I’m surprized that the Clipper works with raster features.
Kevin: A number of our traditionally vector transformers work with raster data in exactly the same way – the Clipper is one of them; other transformer examples include Offsetter, Scaler, Reprojector… So don’t assume that a transformer won’t work with raster data just because it doesn’t have “raster” in the transformer name. This is where Workbench seems to be uniquely positioned – there are a growing number of situations where people need to work with both vector and raster data together. In Workbench you can work with raster and vector data together and it simply relies on the creativity of the user to determine how they are going to work with this data combination.

Clipping: Does clipping keep measures on features?
Kevin: Yes. For those not familiar with measures, some formats e.g. SDE, Oracle, Smallworld, have the ability to store additional information at each node along a geometry such as speed limit of a road, width of river, or accuracy. With FME 2007, clipping and these type of operations will maintain this information.

Can rasters be rotated? What is the difference between rotating the data within a raster and rotating the geo-referenced points that tie a raster to the Earth and yet leave the raster itself?
Ryan P: We currently do not have rotation support for rasters. This may be something we add in our next development cycle, which will focus more on raster processing. Rasters can often be rotated by the viewing application without altering its georeferencing. The planned work would rotate the raster itself, not just a cached view of it, affecting a change to the georeferencing as well.

Will you add the ability to vectorize raster data i.e. extract roads, railway lines etc from an aerial photograph?
Kevin: This is an incredibly difficult problem that has been well solved by other companies. It’s most likely that this will become available as a third-party plug-in for Workbench in the future, in the same way that we have partnered with the developers of MRFClean and Curvefit.

What kind of reproject engines can FME use?
Dale: In FME 2007, FME can use either the built-in reproject engine that it always has had, or the ESRI engine if it is available. (At the present time, the ability to chose has not been pushed up into the user interface, so the ESRI one is not available to end users yet). If there’s interest, we could add more reproject engines as options, including, for example, Blue Marble’s (most likely as an extra cost item), and PROJ4 (if someone wanted to match PostGIS’s reproject results).

How do I find the mid-point of a line?
Kevin: Use the Snipper transformer; for example, you can snip with the start or end points being 50% to give you a point half-way along.
Will that preserve measures?
Kevin: Yes, as of 2 am the night before last. <laughter fills the room> You can snip a line and it will interpolate X, Y, Z, and measures for that point, or for the end point if you wanted the line.

Will you support Bentley’s XFM format, which is XML data within a DGN file?
Dale: As soon as the specs are available we will definitely want to support that. Maybe you could assist us by expressing your need for this to Bentley, or supplying us a contact at Bentley who we could work with.

Will you support Oracle SDO topology?
Dale: We have some major clients who need that so we will definitely be supporting this.

Your 3D geometry reprojection does not seem to take the ellipsoid into account.
Kevin: This is a valid concern. I’m not sure if changing reproject engines will address this or not.
Dale: We will have to look at that very carefully. Our Zs do not play a role in reprojections right now. Elevations in FME are not used when we reproject, but ellipsoids play a role in the calculations for the X and Y.
Mark S: I believe Shell added their own transformer to address that.

My mapping files, which were created eight years ago, still work reliably. If I make the transition from mapping files to workspaces, can I expect the same stability?
Kevin: Yes, we invest considerable effort to ensure backwards compatibility. Our transformers all have version numbers inside so that they will work the same way that they always used to, unless you refresh the transformers.

Do Don and Dale still write code?
Kevin: Yes…and some of it works. <laughter fills the room>

If you have set up a workspace that is connected to either a source or a destination dataset, usually databases, is there any way to automatically re-synchronize the schema if the dataset changes?
Matt: Yes, if you right-click on either the source or destination Feature Type definitions and pick Refresh Schema, then FME will go look at the dataset and replace the schema in Workbench with the one that’s in the dataset.

When can we expect Workbench to be ported to a Mac platform?
Don: We are not anxious to do that anytime soon. We are carefully watching the Wine group and their capability to run Windows applications on Linux/Mac on Intel.
(Editor’s note: Grahame H. then demonstrated Workbench running on a Mac - with some bugs in the toolbar still.)

Will AutoCAD 2007 support be available in FME 2007?
Harbinder: Yes, it will be available in FME 2007.

What additional capability will FME 2007 have re. raster reprojection?
Ryan P: Improvements will primarily be performance-related, but FME 2007 will additionally have some other features like new interpolation types BILINEAR and BICUBIC for both resampling and reprojection.

When can we expect a nicer GUI for editing coordinate systems?
Dale: That is something we are considering doing in the 2007 calendar year.

Do you plan to support translating from S57 to VPF?
Mark S: If you try to do this, you will need support from a professional psychiatrist. Unfortunately we don’t have one here amongst our doctor’s today. I recommend that you contact the Professional Services team at Safe if you need to do this. Seriously, the difficulty is in writing to VPF - because it has a complex data model - and S57 is not a simple data model either, so we’d recommend involving our Professional Services people who have in-depth experience with both these formats. We also have a page on our website about complex formats that’s worth reading as well.

When should I use FME Objects with my applications, and when should I instead use FME fired up from my application as a system call?
Kevin: There are so many variables that have to be set, based on the design of every system. Fil V. at Safe can help if you are wondering what the best approach is.

Are you planning to improve reading and writing multi-page GeoTIFFs?
Ryan P: Yes, when enough people request this.

When I use CurveFitter, how can I ensure the end nodes stay put?
Kevin: CurveFitter does in fact leave the end nodes where they are.
Mark S: This is a variable parameter that the user specifies.

FME has two different MapInfo readers – how do I decide which one to use?
Dale: MapInfo MFAL is the one most commonly used; this is the default reader that uses libraries from MapInfo. The MITAB-based writer is intended for users creating MapInfo files on Unix, although in most cases users wouldn’t notice a difference between the results produced by these two readers or writers. The MFAL-based writer also produces better spatially indexed output files than the MITAB-based writer.

Why doesn’t the GDF writer appear on Workbench’s list of writers even though Safe’s website says we can write it?
Dale: GDF is a very complex format and we find that most users need a lot of consulting support to create a good dataset. In fact, that might form the basis of a good FME Idol challenge for next year’s conference.
Mark I: Yes, and if they start now, our contestants might be finished just before the end of next year’s conference. .<laughter fills the room> Seriously, though, we strongly recommend using our Professional Services people to assist in any GDF writing.

I have a map that shows water mains with smaller connected pipes that have valves attached. How can I identify valves indirectly connected to a water main.
Kevin: Use a Spatialrelator in a workspace followed by a Pointonlineoverlayer.

Could you consider adding the capability, in Workbench, to select a transformer in such a way that all other transformers linked to it are then highlighted?
Matt: This is an interesting idea and we’ll consider it.

As a user, I really like the new dockable panels in Workbench.
Matt: Thanks.

Will you be hosting another FME Worldwide User Conference next year?
Dale: That depends on what our users want. Maybe we should hold it here in Vancouver, but next time in the ski season. And I think next year we will have a Julie Andrews recording on hand so we’re ready to drown out Don when he starts singing “These are a few of my favourite things…” when Dmitri is demonstrating his latest Custom Transformers.

Safe's First FME Worldwide User Conference - A Great Experience for Staff and Users

2006-09-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Vancouver Python Workshop and FME Support for Python

2006-09-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

Posted by Tom Weir, Safe Software developer and resident Pythonista

I noted in a recent (Sunday) posting on the Python Software Foundation (PSF) weblog at http://pyfound.blgspot.com/ that the organizers of the Vancouver Python User Group (www.vanpyz.org) have donated over $5,000 to the Python Software Foundation. The donated funds are the proceeds from the Vancouver Python Workshop, which Safe Software was proud to sponsor.

However, we didn't just sponsor the workshop, we also had a great time attending this event as well; over a dozen of our developers and members of our Professional Services team spent their weekend absorbing a wide variety of Python tips and tricks.

Some of the highlights of workshop’s jam-packed schedule, from my perspective, were as follows:

Guido van Rossum gave a great overview of the near, and long-tem plans for the Python language. It’s nice to know that the language is moving forward, but we won't be losing any of the features that make Python great. Guido also gave us some insight into how Google is making extensive use of Python in its internal systems.

Jim Hugunin, and IronPython: The keynote & talks about IronPython turned out to be some of the more popular sessions. Microsoft has spent a lot of time adding Python language support to DotNet, and the information presented at http://www.ironpython.com/ is well worth checking out.

Paul Prescod gave an excellent series of Python tutorials, which provided great training for our some of our staff members who hadn't used Python yet.

Ian Caven gave a truly cool presentation discussing how Python is used at Lowry Digital to digitally restore films. I've seen Ian present before, and he clearly articulates where and how Python should be used in large systems.

Although I’ve identified the aforementioned presentations as conference highlights, I think it’s very important to mention that members of the local Python community who stepped up to the plate also gave an assortment of truly excellent talks. The variety and passion of the talks given was a true testament to the value of community-organized conferences.

Not content to merely sit in the audience, I also gave a presentation www.vanpyz.org/conference/talks/details?code=bjQXNV that discussed some of the technical details of how we've provided access to Python from within FME.

Over the past several FME releases, we've been slowly adding new Python support to FME, and with FME 2007, our Python support is about to hit the big time.

Our upcoming FME 2007 release includes the following Python-related
features:

A brand-new PythonFactory
A much-improved PythonCaller transformer
A new PythonCreator tranformer
Startup/Shutdown Python scripts (editable in FME Workbench)
A new code editor in Workbench for editing your Python Code

(I’ll be presenting this information again on Thursday 21 September at our FME Worldwide User Conference in Vancouver BC. If you’d like to view the slides from my presentation, they’ll be available in a few days time from www.safe.com/2006uc. Check out the presentation by Andrew Smith from Lagen Saptial as well.)

Getting started with FME & Python is fairly easy. You need to download a copy of Python (Python 2.4 is recommended) from www.python.org/download.

Then install a FME 2007 Beta (any build number greater than 4138 will do) from www.safe.com/beta/index.php.

Read the new docs and examples at www.safe.com/python.

For more information on FME and Python, see www.fmepedia.com.

The Spatial Data Gold Rush

2006-08-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

Mark I is one of several Safe staff just back in the office after attending GeoWeb 2006 here in Vancouver. Mark posted these reflections on the conference:

Based on what I observed at the recent GeoWeb conference for web-based GIS, it appears to me that the industry is operating at two different levels.

On one level, the Google Earth revolution continues unabated. It really is incredible how smaller organizations and companies, having seen the potential of this product, have suddenly recognized the benefits of viewing their data on a map. The ensuing dash to publish has an urgency reminiscent of the gold rushes of the 1800s. As with the original gold rush, this one is centred on west coast America. Springing up along with this rush are a number of ancillary organizations ready to provide products and assistance to the pioneers. In this case they are small system integrators willing to help convert data or create mashups by combining company data with freely available online content. The concern voiced during one of the GeoWeb panel discussions is that openly published data of unknown quality is open to misinterpretation. The hope is that the smaller integrators will preserve the quality of the information by providing the knowledge that the non-GIS specialists lack.

At another level are the major GIS-users - the larger organizations such as cities, government departments and system integrators. These groups are looking to easily receive, incorporate and disseminate their spatial information on demand, in a multitude of different formats. At Safe we see this as the natural role for our FME and SpatialDirect technology. The forthcoming FME Spatial ETL Server will queue ad-hoc requests for data and process them in turn, seamlessly uploading and delivering any number of formats. Source data can even be restructured to match the required schema, or the output transformed to produce entirely new products. SpatialDirect and its WFS Server provide the entire solution for web administration and delivery of data. As our FME movie says, delivering the right data, in the right structure, at the right time.

It’s quite exciting to consider the range of possible solutions we can provide, but it’s also a sobering thought that FME will likely be the unsung hero. Few people benefiting from the process would even know that FME existed - FME would be an invisible product automagically producing data. To quote The Wizard of Oz, end users will likely “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

Just Released: FME 2006 GB!

2006-06-28T17:35:00.000-07:00

Posted by Dale Lutz, VP of Product Development

We officially released FME 2006 GB today. By my count this is the 18th official release of FME (beginning with FME 1.4.7).

When I reflect on how much FME has grown since its humble beginnings back in 1995, I can’t help but think, Wow! FME now includes more than 3 million lines of code and multiple third party libraries that hum together like a beautiful symphony when we assemble a final release. Making all the parts work together just so is, of course, our primary focus in developing each official release, and it certainly is a challenge. We actually froze our feature set for this release back in February! The majority of our development team cut over to FME 2007, and the remainder refined and polished several features while we assembled all the documentation. (The extreme icon makeover for the Workbench and Viewer interfaces meant every single screenshot had to be redone, which kept our technical writers busy.)

The significant improvements in this release are listed in our press release at www.safe.com/company/news/2006/87/index.htm and also on our release highlights page at www.safe.com/2006GB. Ironically, sometimes the improvements that turn out to be the most popular with users are the ones that took the least time to develop. A prime example for this release is the new counters on the connecting lines in Workbench. Although this feature took only two days of development time, most casual FME users will find it the most addictive and compelling upgrade feature. I think there’s a lesson here for all developers. Maybe we will set aside a week or two for the whole development team to “just do something easy” for FME 2007 and see what comes out of that.

It’s exciting to see the MRFCleaner make its debut in the GB release. (See www.safe.com/mrfclean for details.) Not only does the MRFCleaner provide geometry cleaning technology that many users have requested repeatedly for quite some time, but this is also the first example of a third party integrating their niche software into the FME framework so that the technology can be applied to multiple formats. A number of similar initiatives are in the pipeline, so watch for more announcements of this type for FME 2007.

An interesting aspect of Safe’s releases is that, because we believe in making our betas available continuously, and because the code has been frozen for so long, many of our users have in fact been using FME 2006 GB for literally months already! So the official release is in some respects a bit anticlimactic for many of us. But some of our users can only use official releases, and this is why we continue with our somewhat aggressive goal of producing two official releases per year. The reality is that the world of formats and standards does not stand still: KML 2.1, OGC Simple Features for GML, GML 3.1.1, GML 3.1.2, TOP10NL, DGNV8, and AutoCad 2007 DWG have all evolved or emerged in the past few months. Some of these are supported in the GB release, and we are working on others for FME 2007.

In any case, the GB release is now out the door. Our rule is that we don’t post betas for the next release (in this case FME 2007) until the official release is out, so now we can move ahead on that.

Another day, another build.

MRF Clean Technology Now Available for FME Users

2006-06-01T14:23:00.000-07:00

Today we announced that MRF Geosystems Corporation of Calgary has made their MRF Clean technology available to our FME customers. You’ll find details about this technology, as well as a free trial, available on our website at www.safe.com/mrfclean.

The release of this technology represents a significant development for FME users, as well as an important milestone for Safe Software, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, many FME users have been requesting this type of functionality for a very long time. With great patience, they’ve been waiting for a means of eliminating much of the tedious manual data cleanup required after spatial ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) migrations from CAD to GIS, CAD to CAD, or even from GIS to GIS. MRF Clean technology automates this process by performing conflation, snapping, and other cleaning operations during data migration from source to destination.

Secondly, this product release is important because it represents the first of several significant third-party add-ins under development for FME. These add-ins constitute just a few of many interesting niche (and mainstream) third-party functionalities out there that could be incorporated into spatial ETL workflows to greatly benefit our users. So watch for similar announcements in the coming months.

Lastly, this development is notable because it is the fruition of discussions begun in 1997! It’s thrilling to witness the realization of an idea that has been discussed and puzzled over for years. There are many reasons why this technology development took so long; some involve technical issues, others involve business issues, and – the common cause for many delays – we simply had so many other equally important things to do. But at last our users’ patience has been rewarded!

So if you are an FME user, be sure to try out the new MRF Clean functionality, and stay tuned for news about more great product releases…

View today’s press release at http://www.safe.com/company/news/2006/85/index.htm.

FME Rocks! Hard Knocks, and a Few Surprises – the FME Regional User Conference Proves Valuable for Both Attendees and Safe Software Staff

2006-05-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, May 3, Safe Software hosted a “first ever” event in Calgary, Alberta, Canada: our first FME Regional User Conference held in North America and organized solely by Safe Software. (We’ve done several other such events in the past, but always on other continents and typically organized by our partners in those areas.)

We had a special sense of anticipation leading up to this event, not only because it was our first self-organized regional conference, but also because, in a sense, this conference represented a return to the company’s roots. Some of Safe Software’s first sales were made to organizations based in Alberta and, nearly ten years later, Safe’s products still enjoy strong support in the region.

Awards
One of the highlights of the day was the opportunity to pay tribute to some of our long-term supporters by presenting three awards:

Carey Prendergast from Seisland Surveys Ltd. accepted Safe Software’s FME Pioneer award presented to Seisland Surveys in recognition of the first deployment of FME in Alberta (in December 1996)
Rick Filafilo from EnCana Corporation accepted Safe Software’s SpatialDirect Pioneer award presented to EnCana Corporation for the first ever deployment of SpatialDirect (in December 1998)
Glenn McKean from the City of Calgary accepted the FME Expertise award presented to the City of Calgary in recognition of the large number of City staff who have an in-depth knowledge of FME.

FME Rocks! Hard Knocks, and a Few Surprises
Another highlight of any event like this, for Safe Software staff, is the chance to meet our product users in person. We were excited and encouraged by the enthusiasm so many of the conference attendees have for FME, and it was especially rewarding to hear comments like, “FME Rocks!” and “FME is robust and reliable.” But it wasn’t all roses and chocolates. We deliberately sought out the bad news as well, because this feedback is crucial to developing a quality product that serves the diverse needs of our users. One of the hard knocks we received was in the area of backwards compatibility issues with a few transformers, and you can be sure we will be extra vigilant about this in the future.

Other valuable insights we gained from chatting with conference attendees included a new appreciation for the size and expertise of the FME and SpatialDirect user community in the region. In addition to our existing Yahoo® group and online FME user community at www.fmepedia.com, Safe Software is actively investigating ways to help develop a communication network between these users. We were pleased to learn how extensively our Unix support is utilized by many of the attendees, and were delighted to learn that the recently written “TextLine” reader/writer plays a key role in many workflows. (The two owners of Safe Software wrote this reader/writer themselves and are very proud of it.J)

Conference Presentations
One of the greatest pleasures of hosting a conference such as this is sharing the task with co-presenters from other companies who value your product and are willing to step forward and tell their own user stories. The complete set of slides from the user presentations, as well as presentations from Safe Software’s staff, will be available soon at www.safe.com/company/fmeuc2006-calgary/index.php.

Representatives from the following companies presented user stories:

Anadarko Canada – Vic Rogerson explained how Anadarko Canada initially used FME for simple format translations, but now uses FME for multiple tasks throughout the company. Typical applications include moving data from a large relational database to an ArcSDE database, with required geometry conversions, and converting file formats for data distribution from the ArcSDE database.
Devon Canada – Mark Giesbrecht described how FME reduced the time required to produce weekly updates from a database of 2D and 3D seismic oil and gas exploration data from two days to 20 minutes, with the results circulated to users as SEGP text, as well as SHAPE and SDE geometry files.
EnCana Corporation – Kathy Irwin outlined how EnCana uses FME to migrate data to a central Oracle Spatial data repository using ArcSDE 9.1. As well, EnCana uses SpatialDirect for format translation as part of the data distribution process, and FME for MapGuide allows their MapGuide users to view ArcSDE data directly.
Midwest Surveys Inc. – Bryan Waller enumerated Midwest Surveys’ three main applications for FME: datum, projection and file format conversion; checking the quality of land parcel maps delivered in CAD format and repairing the geometry of map features; and loading this information into ArcSDE for use in web and desktop GIS applications and other mapping applications.
City of Calgary – Mike Szarmes and Nadia Namini described how the City of Calgary uses FME to manage the City’s water supply, sanitary systems and storm drainage systems. FME integrates MicroStation DGN files (in 387 sections) with an Oracle database (of 100 tables) and transforms this data into 77 different ArcSDE layers. FME modifies geometry and attributes, and performs quality assurance, quality control, and linear referencing, as well as some other geometric manipulations.

Technical Tracks
In addition to the information-packed morning session, Safe Software staff presented five different technical sessions in the afternoon. Attendees could pick any two of the following presentations:

FME Introduction – This session was targeted at attendees with little or no experience with FME and featured a wide range of demonstrations.
FME Best Practices – Taken from our recently revamped FME training course, this session outlined the best ways to use and deploy FME technology, with an emphasis on features recently added to Workbench that help to organize large workspaces.
Introduction To FME SpatialDirect – This session provided a thorough introduction to the FME SpatialDirect web-based data distribution system.
FME in Oil and Gas – Popular with many attendees, this session looked at a number of formats and workflows of specific interest to customers in the Oil and Gas Sector.
FME and ArcSDE/Geodatabase – This technical session explained the details of FME’s comprehensive support for ArcSDE and Geodatabase.

Looking Forward
All in all, the conference was a huge success, and it was gratifying to have so many participants request that we host the same event next year. We can hardly wait for our next “first ever” event – our first FME Worldwide User Conference in Vancouver, BC, on September 21-22. Details on this conference are available at www.safe.com/company/fmeuc2006.

Hope to see you there!

FME Worldwide User Conference in Vancouver, September 21-22, 2006

2006-04-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

The first ever FME Worldwide User Conference is coming to
Vancouver, BC, Canada!

If you use Safe Software's FME technology, or you work with spatial data, this event has been planned especially for you.

Connect With Other FME Users

There’s no substitute for the chance to chat with an FME expert in person! If you are an FME user, this conference provides a great opportunity for you to meet with other FME users in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. You’ll learn how others are using FME technology to overcome their spatial data challenges, and have opportunities to share your FME expertise with others. You’ll also hear about new functionality planned for future FME updates. The staff from Safe Software look forward to meeting you too and learning how they can improve FME to meet your needs.

Learn About Powerful Spatial Data Translation and Transformation Products

If you’ve heard about Safe Software’s products but have not had the opportunity to see them in action, this conference will provide you a great overview of their diverse potential applications. Our flagship Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) technology not only allows seamless translation of spatial data into hundreds of raster and vector GIS, CAD, and database formats, but also has sophisticated data transformation capability that can be applied to a surprising variety of tasks. FME technology can be used for:

Combining data sources
Loading databases
Legacy GIS migration
CAD to GIS migration
GIS to CAD migration
Coordinate system conversion

Conference Highlights

Highlights of this two-day conference will include:

Keynote and Road Ahead address by Don Murray and Dale Lutz, Safe Software’s co-founders
FME Idol
Stump the Experts
User Stories
Doctor’s Office
Poster Gallery
Breakout sessions on various topics including loading databases, CAD to GIS/GIS to CAD migration, coordinate system conversion, best practices with FME, FME SpatialDirect, and more…

More Information

For more information, and to register for this event, visit www.safe.com/company/fmeuc2006.

Registrations received before 15 May qualify for the early bird rate of $500 CDN (a savings of $250)

2006 Poised to be Another Dramatic Year for the Spatial Data Industry

2006-03-28T17:24:00.000-08:00

Our Industry Insights category includes articles written by Safe Software staff and other experts in the field of spatial data interoperability. We've included these articles in our blog so you can keep up-to-date with news and events in the industry.

Authors: Don Murray, President, Safe Software & Dale Lutz, VP Product Development, Safe Software

This past year brought some of the most rapid changes ever witnessed in the spatial data industry with regard to where spatial data is used and how it is delivered. And all indicators point to more dramatic changes to come. Many interoperability issues that hampered the spatial data industry in the past are being left behind as data formats and GIS applications themselves are becoming more interoperable. Data creators are increasingly adopting standard formats specified by the OGC, particularly those related to Web Feature Services (WFS) and the upcoming Simple Features for Geography Markup Language (SFGML). Many GIS products can now use most common data formats, either through direct access or third-party extensions.

On the other hand, however, there continues to be an operational requirement for increasingly sophisticated data transformation, most often to assist in the integration of data from multiple sources. Years ago the only requirement for interoperability was that a format could be read or written; now the results must also be readily integrated into larger systems with predefined schemas, and hence the importance of the transformation portion of the data migration and integration process. All the major vendors are rising to the challenge and supporting easier data integration. We can see this in multiple products including Autodesk Map3D, ESRI ArcGIS, Google Earth, Intergraph Geomedia, and MapInfo Professional. In some of these applications this is accomplished directly through Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) technology.

The volume of spatial data being generated has increased at a phenomenal rate, and we have seen a parallel explosion of interest in spatial data. Businesses are becoming increasingly aware of the important contribution spatial data can bring to better decision-making, and also the competitive edge timely spatial data can bring to a crowded marketplace. Even companies that were not traditional spatial data vendors are beginning to integrate spatial data into their products. Examples of this are Google’s Maps and Earth, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth—complementing the existing MapPoint line—and Yahoo Maps. On the storage and retrieval side, enterprise-level databases such as Oracle and DB2 have supported spatial data for several years, but more recently open source players such as MySQL and PostgreSQL have also added native support for spatial data.

We see this new interest in spatial data and the corresponding entrance of new players in the spatial data industry as extremely beneficial for traditional spatial data vendors—their debut is an unequivocal endorsement of the value of spatial data, and, after all, a rising tide floats all boats. Traditional non-spatial ETL vendors are already working towards strategic alliances with vendors in the spatial data industry who can provide them with the capability to integrate spatial data. Partnerships such as the one between SAS and ESRI will likely be only the first of many in the business intelligence sector.

The increasing availability of technology for collecting high-quality imagery is driving the need for software solutions that deal with the management, visualization, and analysis of this imagery. Some impressive new products include Oracle 10gR2, which stores compressed spatially-located imagery in the database. ESRI’s ArcSDE technology allows for storing and accessing large volumes of raster data—both compressed and uncompressed—across multiple database platforms. ESRI has also released its new file-based Image Server that makes it possible to serve up imagery in near real-time.

At Safe Software, we will continue our commitment to solve intransigent data operability issues. As data transformations become increasingly sophisticated, we intend to provide leading-edge solutions for large-scale data migration and integration, and to provide innovative solutions for raster integration issues. We’re looking forward to the next year. If 2005 is any indication, 2006 is sure to be an interesting one for the spatial data community.

Safe Software Inc., FME and SpatialDirect are registered trademarks of Safe Software Inc. All other product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Industry Outlook 2006: Technological Advancements in Open and Interoperable Solutions

2006-03-28T17:09:00.000-08:00

Our Industry Insights category includes articles written by Safe Software staff and other experts in the field of spatial data interoperability. We've included these articles in our blog so you can keep up-to-date with news and events in the industry.

Dale Lutz, Safe Software's VP of Product Development, was invited to submit his Industry Outlook for 2006 to Geoplace.com.

You can view Dale's article at www.geoplace.com/uploads/industryoutlook_06/bios/lutz.asp

Third Scandinavian FME User Group Meeting

2006-02-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

The Third Scandinavian FME User Group Meeting took place in Lund, Sweden, on February 7, 2006. This event was sponsored and hosted by ESRI Sweden, Lantmäteriet, Tekis, and Sweco and was a huge success with over 40 FME users attending.

Dale Lutz, Safe Software's VP of Product Development, chaired the day and presented several sessions. The sessions included a look at the latest functionality in FME and a sneak peak at upcoming features under development. Dale also presented some FME workspaces that were in need of an "extreme makeover" as a lead-in to a discussion about the importance of applying best practice in FME. Several participants expressed particular appreciation for Dale's session on rasters.

Four expert FME users also presented sessions describing how they had used FME to solve spatial data challenges.

Ulf Mansson from SWECO Position AB, one of Safe Software's resellers based in Sweden, demonstrated the use of FME to extract data from an existing SDE database and convert the data to AutoCAD DWG.

Sabina Bernhard and Nils-Erik Dahlsten presented an overview of their pioneering effort to export data in the Swedish Interface 2000 format to deliver map changes to Land Survey of Sweden.

Peter Laulund from National Survey and Cadastre, Denmark, described a process for dynamically configuring translations using mapping files, Tcl, and external databases in a large-scale digital map production system.

For more details on this event, please visit Safe Software's website at www.safe.com/fmeuc2006.

Lots More In Store

2006-02-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

You've reached the end of our blog postings. But there's plenty more information available about Safe Software, our products, and services on our website at www.safe.com.

Better still, try our products for yourself. You can download your own free 14-day evaluation of FME and an easy-to-follow FME Tutorial from www.safe.com/support/downloads. Even if you don't know what the abbreviation"GIS" means, and you've never dropped a map data file in a map viewer before or performed a single spatial data file format translation, you'll find the tutorial exercises fun and straightforward. (No programming skills required.)

For technical advice about FME and SpatialDirect and a host of other information provided by Safe Software staff and enthusiastic FME users, check out our online user community or "wiki" at www.fmepedia.com.