Transforming Data into Information: Supporting Dashboards with FME
Presentation Details
Data inventories provide high value to an organization if properly exploited. This presentation will focus on the journey we embarked on to open up a disparate collection of data inventories and expose their contents in a way that is efficient and user friendly. Tableau offers a rich interactive experience that allows the user to gain insight and enhance the decision-making process and was identified as the platform for viewing the inventories.
The greatest challenge with this process was translating the disparate data sources to a format Tableau can read and making this process repeatable for frequent updates. The data was represented in several formats including GIS, excel, Access database tables, and text files. Blending the data within Tableau presented a challenge due to the varying formats, therefore FME was used as the middle man to translate the data from its source to a native Tableau data extract. The process of creating the source data also included merging data in different formats based on both attribute values and spatial proximity. FME’s data format versatility and powerful spatial processing made it the perfect tool for the job. In many cases, the data is best represented by watershed or project footprint rather than by Tableau's available default geometry, so the utility of the dashboard was greatly improved using custom geometry created in FME. This presentation will explore the data blending challenges encountered in this project and the solutions developed in FME.