So Much Data, So Little Time! City of Ottawa Uses FME to Create Time
Every month The City of Ottawa’s Surveys and Mapping Department has a daunting vector conversion project to tackle: converting over 250,000 property parcels and updating all the property lines. Essentially each property parcel contains numerous lines and it is these lines, not the parcels, which are updated with new information. This data then needs to be made available to a variety of individuals, ranging from city planners to financial analysts.
Stephen Perkins, Senior Project Photogrammetrist, used to spend weeks performing these vector conversions and then still needed to do quality control to ensure the data had been transformed correctly.
While looking for a way to make this process quicker and more efficient, Stephen discovered FME. Using FME, Stephen was able to automate the monthly conversion processes and data validation tasks, saving the City’s Surveying and Mapping team a pile of time.
“Data processing is no longer a chore for us,” says Stephen. “And with the drag and drop feature, we save so much time creating the workspaces we frequently access, we’ve been wondering: Can it really be that simple?!”
Stephen now completes both the data conversions and the now-automated quality checks in only a few hours. “It used to take us 2 – 3 weeks to complete these updates. Now, I set the script to run at the end of the day and when I come back in the morning, it’s done and the data is ready for us to use.”
Running these automated updates means that his team spends less time converting and disseminating data and more time working on other important projects. For example, every few years his team needs to convert very large raster datasets of ortho-rectified imagery of the UNESCO World Heritage Rideau Canal site. Usually, the imagery is just within the City of Ottawa, but this year the project included the entire 200km length of the canal. Using FME, they were able to quickly perform a coordinate system conversion and tiling and resolution adjustment with over 15,000 images at 20cm resolution. These images are then used by UNESCO to monitor ongoing maintenance of the site and to ensure that the Rideau Canal meets the World Heritage designation.
Time saved on converting data, means more time for the City’s Surveys and Mapping team to enjoy the beauty of the Rideau Canal, including ice-skating on this world-famous site during the winter.
Learn how to easily convert raster datasets in an upcoming webinar: safe.local/rasterwebinar
