Calculating River Width – Replacing the Measuring Tape by FME

HERE MAPS is not all about roads! Other issues like coastline, ocean and river worldwide representation are a challenging topic for our products. How to calculate River Width using an automated process, that lays down in a fast/resource balanced option? This was a recent challenge we faced. Measuring Tape is not a choice, even if it inspired our process. We are not measuring only 1 river, which would be painful already, depending on the river, or rivers for 1 Nation. This presentation shows how we got there, using FME, without leaving our desk. Even if it would be nice to have field trips around the world but that is not possible due time and resources. After a few tests and a couple of scenarios we reached a process that generates river cross sections using oriented bounding boxes/overlaid with our vector data, allowing calculation of average width, as well other statistical information.