City of Göteborg Chooses FME Server

11 August 2008, 11:43am

Vancouver, BC, August 11, 2008 - Safe Software, the leaders in spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) announced today that the City of Göteborg, the second-largest city in Sweden, has chosen FME Server to power the exchange of its geospatial data throughout its various departments. The project is part of an initiative in which the City and its surrounding municipalities are adopting SWEREF 99, Sweden's national coordinate system, to ensure greater accuracy when sharing spatial data. FME Server, Safe Software's scalable data transformation and distribution solution, will now enable the City to more efficiently provide data consumers across all departments with access to spatial data where, when, and how they need it.

City of GöteborgThe increasing need to share spatial data across diverse government agencies prompted the creation of a single projection for Sweden, SWEREF 99. With the wide range of spatial data formats and models created and used by each of the City’s departments, the GIS group faced the daunting challenge of finding the most efficient way to convert their large volumes of spatial data to this new coordinate system, while still ensuring data accuracy. To accomplish this, the City’s GIS department sought a spatial ETL solution that could empower end users, who have the best knowledge of their data and requirements, to perform these conversions themselves using a simple online service.

"We knew that converting such a large set of data would require a flexible, efficient solution which could provide utmost precision in the transformation process," says Maria Sjöberger, GIS developer at Göteborg's City Planning Authority. "With such diversity in end user requirements for this data, we really needed an online solution that could enable these users – regardless of their geodetic background – to be able to reproject their own data."

With FME Server, the City's users will be able to access an online, self-service interface to upload and convert their spatial data into the new coordinate system as required. Behind the scenes, the GIS department will only need to create the most commonly required transformation tasks and upload them to FME Server, thereby empowering end users to perform the conversions they require without assistance or GIS training.

"FME Server makes it possible for our GIS department to provide transformation as web services without the need for complicated, time-consuming development," says Sjöberger. "Now spatial data users across all departments will be able to convert their spatial data as needed so they can efficiently share it with other departments and government agencies."

The City of Göteborg will be implementing FME Server to power their spatial data reprojection initiative in September 2008 with the assistance of SWECO, a certified FME reseller in Sweden. The project will be rolled out in two major stages by the end of this year. In the first stage, the GIS department will use FME to transform the spatial data held in its Oracle Spatial database. The second stage will enable users from all departments to exchange data by accessing FME Server online, uploading their spatial data files and converting them as required.

Launched in March, FME Server is being adopted by organizations around the world who are seeking to make their spatial data accessible and usable to users – where, when and how they need it. To learn how FME Server can solve your data transformation and distribution challenges, visit our demo library at www.safe.com/FMEServerDemos.

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