When a hurricane, a tsunami, or other disaster occurs, one of the first and most critical challenges facing effective disaster response is rapid access to accurate spatial data. Safe Software, makers of the FME® spatial ETL (extract, transform, and load) platform, will discuss solutions to this challenge during a presentation at URISA’s 2007 Annual Conference, to be held in Washington, DC, August 20-23. Safe will also be exhibiting at booth number 317 from August 21-22.
"In the chaotic aftermath of a disaster, a GIS disaster response team must quickly integrate location-based data provided by multiple agencies, and make the results available to other teams and organizations," said Dean Hintz, senior consultant and presenter from Safe Software. "The challenge facing responding organizations is that most of this data is not immediately usable with their GIS tools. The data may be in a variety of different map scales and coordinate systems, and it often spans a wide range of data structures, formats and standards – from vector to raster, from spatial to attribute only or text, and from open standards such as GML, WFS and WMS, to de-facto and proprietary standards."
For example, during the response phase of a disaster, a GIS team may need to plan an effective strategy using basemap data in ESRI Shapefiles, engineering data in MicroStation, topological data in GML, and flood extent data in WFS. In order for a GIS system to use these diverse data sources, the data first needs to be translated into a common format or data structure.
This can waste critical time if the team is hand coding the required data transformations, or relying on tools that deal with only a limited number of formats. Safe Software’s presentation will use a hypothetical disaster response scenario to show how spatial ETL tools provide important advantages over other approaches by rapidly integrating diverse source data into a common model. In addition, the presentation will demonstrate how this technology plays an important role in distributing data to response teams.
"Spatial ETL tools can dramatically reduce response time in a disaster management scenario," says Drew Rifkin, Safe Software account manager and co-presenter with Hintz. "These tools enable GIS teams to quickly integrate multiple data types, while preserving the meaning of the information during transformation of the data to a common model. What’s more, they can directly read from and write to multiple data stores, regardless of data structure or format. This significantly streamlines both receiving and distributing critical information, and ultimately helps disaster response teams save more lives."
Safe Software will present on August 22 at 10:30 am in the Monroe West room at the Hilton Washington. To learn more about spatial ETL, visit www.safe.com. A free 14-day trial of FME, Safe Software’s spatial ETL platform, is available at www.safe.com/tryit.