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Monday March 27 | Tuesday March 28 | Wednesday March 29 Wednesday, March 29, 2000 Hello again from the floor at the GITA conference in Denver! When I left you yesterday I was on my way to look at some of the very latest product offerings being showcased at this years event. The first product I saw in action was Intergraph's In-Service Suite. Essentially, these are off the shelf solutions used to manage and address outage management, workforce management, crew dispatch and mobile data needs. We were given live demos of solutions implemented by Bell Canada and Florida Power Corp (FPC). As an outsider looking at the FPC system for the first time it seems fairly simple and straight forward. I found this amazing considering their plant management system is used to manage an expansive infrastructure serving in excess of 1.3 million customers, and spread out over 20,000 square miles. The system is now online and is used for probable outage prediction, crew management, high intelligence graphic environment, switch plant management, integration with mobile workstations (over 300 mobile units will be added in the near future), and generation of index reports. An enjoyable role-play was offered by the Intergraph and FPC staff. We saw a dispatcher receive a typical trouble call from a customer, he quickly determined possible sources of the trouble and assigned a work order to the nearest field crew (located on his graphic workstation). In addition, a visual display of all possible affected customers was immediately generated from the facility model and road network spatial database. Once the crew had "repaired the defect", the database was quickly updated with the appropriate work details. All in all, a smooth & seamless and impressive demonstration. My next stop was a visit with the CEO/President of iMedion Inc., provider of e-business solutions for the work planning and execution market, for a personal showing of iM:Work. iM:Work is a 100% web-based application suite for the mobile computing market, used to converge wireless web technologies and existing front and back office systems. The system is fully configurable and uses web-based architecture, XML, and wireless functionality to provide a dynamic and interactive field workforce solution. Safe Software of Vancouver, B.C. has released FME 2000. This latest release of the popular data translation and spatial processing software allows data to move between 55 GIS, CAD and database formats. The guys from CARIS-Universal Systems, Fredericton, N.B. gave me a quick look at Spatial Fusion, their internet-based mapping solution used for integrating distributed data sources over the web. I viewed spatial data that was stored in ESRI Shape, Geotiff, Mapinfo MIF, Caris, and Oracle8i Spatial. All data was stored on web servers in a variety of locations but was viewed simultaneously with the map viewer... very cool! Brent Jones, VP of AM/FM/GIS Services at James W. Sewell Company provided me with a look at their AGS Pipeline product, an open system for viewing pipeline data. AGSPipeline was designed to create custom graphical reports of pipeline information from digital data. The customizable VB based GUI front end is used to select from multiple alignment sheet formats and then produce reports, pipeline profiles, and even overlay digital aerial photos and digital ortho photos. They also have several other modules and software components used to manage and manipulate digital pipeline layouts. We'll be looking at these a bit closer in the near future. Byers Engineering and their SpaceAge family of products includes their MapViewer technology, but don't let the name fool you... this is not a simple viewer as the name may imply. These products include a graphics viewing station for viewing, printing and redlining your data. Other products in this suite include Map Viewer Web which adds attribute handling, seamless display, and spatial queries; and Map Viewer Pro and Map Modeler, providing high level network views and a productive AM/FM environment which is very useful to planners. What I found of interest was the impressive speed, simple navigation and comprehensive labeling and text manipulation capabilities of the products. Autodesk had a very visible presence at the expo and was eager to show off the new Maui product, their solution to mobile mapping. I used a Palm V (of which the company was giving away to 50 lucky winners!) to interact with a map of the conference floor. Using the search capabilities I scrolled through the list of exhibitors. When I found what I was searching for I was presented with a map of that particular exhibitor's location and then was able to zoom in and out on the display. A query of the database revealed attributes relating to the object I had selected with my query. If I wanted to add or change any of the information in the database the system also provided me with that functionality as well. While this was a very simple demo of what can be accomplished with the new Maui software, it was pretty neat! Obviously the real-life applications and additional uses of this mobile field unit are numerous. "Autodesk GIS 2000", an event for Autodesk enterprise and desktop customers will be held September 10-13 in San Rafael, CA. Speaking of Autodesk, Tuesday evening Autodesk hosted a first class GITA media dinner. It was an evening of fine food, drink, and music and everyone appeared to enjoy themselves immensely. On a humorous note, all attendees were presented with a really cool "gravity pen" which performs as a pen, pencil and Palm Highlighter. I am sure Autodesk tech support was still being inundated with questions from people regarding the operation of the pen this morning! Anyway, a very special thank-you to Mr. Joe Astroth and his crew for the fine hospitality they extended us... A great time was had by all. These are highlights of only a few of the interesting happenings at GITA and I look forward to bringing you more details once we have some time to get back home and research these products in more detail. I am also happy to report that a number of people have committed to contribute feature columns and perspectives on several of the products that were announced at this show. Well, this year's conference wraps up in a few hours... As the conference winds down, we will continue to meet with people at our booth, finish giving away the last of our 2000 t-shirts & mouse pads, and walk people through our virtual tour of the GeoCommunity website. Then, we will walk over to check out who won the Jeep Wrangler from Smallworld, and BMW roadster from Convergent Group! I couldn't be that lucky? Could I?! So long from Denver... again! Coming News: Wisconsin Gas Selects Smallworld Internet Server Smallworld Releases Smallworld Spatial Intelligence - A Powerful Business Intelligence Application Smallworld Releases Smallworld Scout Smallworld Unveils Design Manager Smallworld Debuts Internet Server - More than just maps on the web! Smallworld, Edinfor Forge Strategic Business Alliance Tobin CEO Introduces Innovations for Land Asset Management- New products Aqua Trac, Tobin Tools, and Terr Trac Announced Tobin has invested millions of dollars in these new products - more to follow soon. ESRI Industry Solutions Manager Mitchell Garnett announces that ESRI staff will be showcasing ArcInfo 8.0.2, ArcFM 8, and ArcIMS. They also announced that the number of business partners has grown from roughly 900 to over 1100 in the past year. Gary Wilkinson Named Vice President at Dimension4 Dimension4 Makes Initial PSCO Deliveries TPLG Announces New CEO TPLG Releases Topology Manager 2 Miner and Miner Announces the Release of ArcFM Energy - software that takes advantage of ArcInfo 8.0.2 platform Severn Trent Systems/Miner & Miner Announce Integration Alliance Danish Utility Implements Miner and Miner's GIS based Operation Management Application Geographic Information Technology (GeoIT) Acquires BaySys Technologies - BaySys is a leading provider of waste water solutions running on ArcInfo. Byres and Telcordia Technologies Align to Provide Advanced Functionality and Availability of Geospatially-Enabled OSS for Telecoms  |
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