Integrys Energy group (www.integrysgroup.com) has been using iFactor’s Vector Rubber Sheeting (VRS) to re-align their geographic data to more accurate positions – moving both 
their landbase and facility geometries so they align more closely to reality so they can now be rendered along with many geographic layers generally available.
The disconnect between the locations shown within Integrys’ GIS system and the GPS coordinates being gathered by field crews was causing difficulties when locating and updating existing facilities, designing and estimating projects and responding to customer and emergency situations. Integrys identified and weighed the options:
… before choosing iFactor’s VRS module. Why? Integrys noted that VRS was designed specifically for Smallworld, was relatively inexpensive, user friendly, worked seamlessly with iFactor’s Web Maps Connector they were already using and allowed them to use in-house labor to do the time consuming Ground Control Point (GCP) digitization after a single day of on-site training. Integrys’ experience with iFactor gave them the confidence to use this relatively new Vector Rubber Sheeting software.
Integrys’ conflation project has moved over 420,000 geometries across multiple datastores. A detailed look at the project was presented at GITA 2011 in Grapevine, Texas (http://tinyurl.com/4olpfw3) with the title: “Deflating the High Cost of Landbase Conflation – A Low Cost Approach at Minnesota Energy Resources”
Entergy (www.entergy.com) chose VRS for similar reasons: cost, simplicity, ease of training for internal resources and a long standing relationship with iFactor. An on-site training session had technicians digitizing GCPs after a few hours and over the next few months they digitized some 16,500 GCPs to closely define the various shifts across the region. The production move of the gas infrastructure in the Baton Rouge area is scheduled to run before the end of March 2011.
Central Hudson recently implemented iFactor’s EZ Archiver product. The project had been delayed over the winter due to record-setting storms that tore through most of New England, and EZ Archiver finally went into production in May.
The EZ Archiver product eliminates the need for an additional Smallworld Server License and speeds up the archive process by moving data from Oracle to Oracle without having to pass through Smallworld Oracle ACP. The product also allows for better logging and error trapping, with no missed projects; an entire project either passes or fails, with no partial project archiving like the core PowerOn module.
In addition, iFactor Consulting’s Greg Ziolkowski converted the production archive PowerOn data to the new EZ Archive system for ease of maintenance (to archive data in one source versus older data in PowerOn and newer data in EZ Acrhiver) and to utilize EZ Archiver’s EZ naming structures. Central Hudson also wrote a series of database views against the EZ Archiver schema to mimic the tables that were in PowerOn, which eliminated any changes or upgrades to their existing reporting structures.
For more information on EZ Archiver, data migration & conversion, and other exciting products from the iFactor team, contact us at sales@ifactorconsulting.com!
Adjusting your geographic data so it is more accurately placed will allow you to leverage the ever-growing set of publicly available data for analysis and visualization as well as more consistently link to the GPS located data from your field crews.
iFactor Consulting’s Vector Rubber Sheeting (VRS) module provides a simple, intuitive and effective means of re-aligning your data. Whether you choose to make alignment adjustments based on an updated landbase, orthophotos or web-maps VRS gives you the tools to make local or global adjustments, each minutely refinable as needed. Here’s an example of a re-alignment in action:
The selected road (solid red) needs to be aligned to the underlying land base (a background Bing Maps street view accessed with iFactor’s Web Maps Connector is used here). Ground control vectors (blue pins and arrows) digitized by the user control the predicted re-alignment (dashed red). The bounding polygon of the ground vectors defines the area of influence for the re-alignment. Once the re-alignment looks acceptable it can be applied to some or all of the geometries in a given area, even if they are in a different dataset. The VRS module provides a rich set of tools for managing the digitized control vectors, their display and analysis. The user digitized data can be saved to file for later use, refinement or for conglomeration with other control vectors defined by other users.
Contact sales@ifactorconsulting.com to learn more.
