The Federated System

1. The Federated System Francois Valois, Product Manager Alain Lapierre, Chief Architect Bentley Systems

2. Agenda • The Information Explosion Era • The Traditional GIS Way • The Search Engine Way • The Geospatial Federated System Way • Federated System not just for Geospatial • Facilitate Integrated Assets Lifecycle • Spatially Indexing Non Spatial Information • Spatially Indexing Spatial files and Spatial Databases • View and Edit Spatial Databases • Workflow management and collaboration • Questions/Answers

3. The Information Explosion Era • Information exploding->becoming virtually impossible to manage without dedicated tools • Unmanaged information-> constantly risking poor decisions making • Data formats, data quality, metadata must be managed • Two types of information must be managed: • Structured information (fixed schema) • Unstructured information (no fixed schema)

4. The Information Explosion Era • 80 percent of business is conducted on unstructured information (Gartner Group). • 85 percent of all data stored is held in an unstructured format (Butler Group). • Unstructured data doubles every three months (Gartner Group). • 7 million web pages are added every day (Gartner Group) Source: DCI Portals, Collaboration and Content Management conference in Miami, Zach Wahl from the Project Performance Corporation

5. The Information Explosion Era • Detailed CAD Design • Geospatial Portal • GIS applications • Web GIS • Spatial Databases • Data Warehouses • Google Earth • Microsoft Virtual Earth • PDF • MS Office

6. The Traditional GIS Way • GIS = information system focusing on land management, natural resource management, utilities, etc • GIS model real world geographic objects in an information system and is typically based on homogenous data • To get data from other sources into the system, traditional GIS have been using data integration techniques • Full system benefits achieved by converting into a homogenous data model with the risk of information loss

7. The Traditional GIS Way • Geographic Information System models the real world as features and typically works with homogenous data.

8. The Search Engine Way • Number of web pages grows by several millions each day • Information comes from all kinds of sources and is very heterogeneous in its content • Searching this information is very fast and very simple using tools like Google • The search engine does not own all the information of all the web pages in the world • Instead, these engines first “crawl” the web pages and then index the content • The system has three components: • Web crawler: finds and fetches web pages • Indexer: sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database • Query processor: which compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant

9. The Search Engine Way • Here is an example of how a search engine technology (Google in this case) works

10. The Geospatial Federated System Way • The Federated System is an hybrid approach • Combines both the GIS approach and the search engine approach • Unique approach allows organizations to manage both structured and unstructured data in the same system • Standard text indexing • Spatial indexing thereby adding immediate value to the information that was not spatially accessible before

11. The Geospatial Federated System Way • Federated System allows dealing with a wider range of information help considering all aspects of a project

12. The Geospatial Federated System Way • Federated System allows dealing with a wider (or broader) range of information • Allows considering all aspects of a project in decision making and analysis

13. Federated System is not just Geospatial • Information Technology • “As the application landscape becomes more complex, enterprises need to provide the accurate information needed to drive the business in a timely fashion. The proven techniques of structured data integration will eventually extend to the world of unstructured data to help overcome this problem.” Gilbert and Friedman, Gartner Group

14. Federated System is not just Geospatial • Many vendors (Oracle, IBM, etc) are working on content integration technologies • Instead of trying to migrate everything out of heterogeneous repositories they create a virtual layer on top • Virtual layer of middleware of structured and unstructured data that acts as a central control point for metadata • Helps reduce complexity of integrating all the back-end information sources • Still get a consistent view of information

15. Spatially Indexing • Indexing: • “the act of classifying and providing an index in order to make items easier to retrieve”. So we could extend this definition for Spatial Indexing to “the act of spatially classifying and providing a spatial index in order to make items easier to retrieve spatially” • Humans vision makes us see things spatially • Much more intuitive to see documents such as PDF or Word documents on a geographic map than in a list. • The Federated System allowing inferring spatial intelligence automatically

16. Facilitate Integrated Assets Lifecycle • Design Process for a bridge • Design is done by an engineer in a CAD system with specialized data • This information is then converted to a GIS system for other people to work with • In this conversion a lot of the real design data is being lost or generalized. • Engineering information although not useful for planning purposes is useful if a problems happens with the bridge 30 years later • Critical to keep data in original format without conversion and allow both detailed design and conceptual representation to co-exist • Federated System offers the best of both worlds • the less detailed data for the planner • the very accurate and precise data for the engineer

17. Spatially Indexing • Non Spatial Information • Inheriting spatial location from a folder • Assigning spatial location based on the name of a file or of a folder • Assigning spatial location based on the content of the file • For spatial information (e.g.: DGN, DWG, SHP) • All of the above + • Automatically index file extent (MBR, Convex Hull, Point) • Automatically index file content (geometry and attributes)

18. Spatially Indexing • Allows managing structured data contained in the database at the same time as unstructured file such as PDF or Word documents • Answer questions such as: • “find the parcel and any other related files with owner=’John Smith’ located spatially in this municipality” • “find the conductors with construction year < 1999, located in this region and also find me all the technical documentation related to it”

19. Spatially Indexing Demo

20. View and Edit Spatial Databases • Working with spatial databases is must for Federated System • Approach different from spatial database middleware Federated System should: • Not try to own the data (non disruptive access) • Not impose a data model (no fix schema, metadata driven) • Use spatial database standard functionality: • geometry types (including 3D) • database coordinate systems • database metadata • database versioning • database topology • database network model • database raster

21. View and Edit Spatial Databases • The Federated System should also allow working in fully connected or disconnected mode • Different transaction types: • including pessimistic short transaction for simple edits, pessimistic long transactions for projects where the organization wants the database to be locked • optimistic long transactions for organizations wanting to evaluate different “what if” scenarios as well as allowing to the database to be unlocked at all time for all users

22. Workflow management and collaboration • Organization members need to work together in a structured, secured, collaborative way • Federated System needs: • Access control • Workflow enforcement • Communication in context • Audit of user actions • Workflow is a set of states (e.g. initial, design, 75% design, complete) successively traversed by an object • For each state different security can be enforced on objects stored in the system • For each state it is also possible to have specific communication enforced through emails. • The Federated System helps organization members get the right information at the right time in the right context

23. Workflow management and collaboration Demo

24. Summary • The Federated System is for: • All organizations managing information that is heterogeneous in nature • Allows managing spatially structured and unstructured information in integrated Geospatial Enterprise Information System • Advances traditional GIS and takes the Geospatial industry to the next level • All project information can be securely accessed, found, edited, managed and archived without conversion

25. THANK YOU. Questions ?