We are Transformers

Safe Software's recent user conference was an unqualified success, with good reviews coming in from around the web, including this one from the keynote speaker, James Fee, and this one from Directions Magazine. Lots of interesting news about the software and its development path, but even better for me, lots of great presentations by people integrating, standardizing, and sharing data in different ways.

Highlights for me:

Jason Birch from the City of Nanaimo gets my nod for most memorable quote: when answering the cocktail party question "what do you do?", he has taken to replying that he is a "Transformer" - a play on the FME objects used to manipulate data, but also an apt acknowledgment of how central data manipulation is for spatial data to "work" in the enterprise. It's really the core of what ICIS does for its members.

Michael Leierer described the WA-Trans project, which is aggregating, standardizing and presenting a statewide transportation network layer from disparate data sources (sound familiar?).

Mark Doring from con terra GmbH spoke about their firm's work integrating member data submissions to the European INSPIRE SDI, which has FME as the centerpiece of a model-to-model transformation infrastructure structured around minimal impact to data provider systems.

Also a lot of very interesting presentations that discussed leveraging cloud computing for data management and mega-map servers (Google) as a presentation context for localized data. James Fee's work with the New Orleans' Data Center provides great food-for-thought for organizations with limited tech staff and large data sharing needs (sound familiar?).

C U at the UC? ETL brainstorming in Whistler

Safe Software is hosting its annual user conference next week in Whistler, and several members of the ICIS team will be there. Spatial ETL technology (extract, transform and load) lies at the heart of the BC Spatial project, and I'll be on the lookout to chisel away at some of my pet favorite questions:

• What opportunities does the server technology provide for facilitating ICIS' load, integration and distribution processes?
• Who else is leveraging this technology to provide similar solutions, what approaches have they taken, and what has been their experience?

The powerful data transformation capabilities speak for themselves as a natural fit to our challenge of building a consistent cadastre from disparate sources, but leave unresolved some practical and philosophical questions about where data standardization is best applied.

If you are planning to be in Whistler next week, I'd love to stew over some of these with you. If we don't bump into each other, you can reach me here to set up a meet!