Farallon Geographics Mobile Data Collection App

25 May 2010, 4:48pm

Farallon Geographics has developed and deployed a workflow-driven mobile data collection application to streamline the development of a comprehensive and accurate storm drain geodatabase and geometric network for a Bay Area city. Field crews required a simple, intuitive and efficient solution for collecting detailed storm drain information including high accuracy GPS data and digital photography. Managers in the office wanted to be able to adjust and visually track progress of the data collection in real-time.

The application uses the Open Source Android mobile platform, allowing it to run on a wide range of devices including modern, high performance smartphones (e.g. Droid, Nexus One) as well as rugged enterprise-class mobile computers with high accuracy GPS receivers such as Trimble devices. The application enables real-time updates of data via WiFi or 3G and has built in spatial and attribute validation features to ensure data accuracy.

The mobile data collection application integrates seamlessly with the city’s central geodatabase using FME Server from Safe Software. FME Server serves spatial data to field collectors so they can assign attributes to the data with the mobile application. The data is validated and transformed by FME Server and then automatically loaded into the city’s ESRI geodatabase. For managers in the office, Farallon developed streaming KML services using FME Server that allow office staff to review field data using Google Earth.

This allows managers to track progress, identify errors or inconsistencies, and provide feedback to field crews in real time.
This easy-to-use mobile application, capable of real-time integration with GIS services and geodatabases, reduced data collection times by over 50% while simultaneously improving accuracy. It is easy to use, flexible to deploy and requires minimal training.

A video demo of this application can be seen at the link below. Custom implementations are available through Farallon Geographics.

About Farallon Geographics

Farallon Geographics (www.fargeo.com), based in San Francisco, is a leader in the planning, implementation, and integration of GIS systems and software to support mission critical business functions. As systems integrators focused on geographical data, Farallon provides unique and unbiased strategic and technical implementation services for enterprise-scale GIS.

About Safe Software

Safe Software is the recognized leader in spatial ETL. Its platform, FME, unleashes spatial data to be used where, when, and how it’s needed. It delivers the most extensive format support for data translation and integration, and provides unlimited flexibility in data model transformation and data distribution.

See the video demo here!

Farallon Geographics

Safe Software

Geo: International