Safe Software First to Enable Seamless Integration

10 March 2010, 9:28am

Vancouver, BC, March 10, 2010 – Safe Software today announced that its leading spatial extract, transform and load (ETL) solution, FME®, can now seamlessly integrate Autodesk® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® data into geographic information systems (GIS). First in the industry, these new capabilities will help municipalities more efficiently leverage contractor data submissions to maintain their GIS dataset for meeting their federal asset management requirements.

To fulfill government regulated mandates related to infrastructure asset tracking, GIS technicians at municipalities must regularly gather as-built data in Civil 3D format from contractors and manually input this information into their GIS. Time consuming and prone to human error, the inefficiency of manual data entry prevents GIS professionals from gaining the full richness of Civil 3D datasets and results in time lags that hinder data maintenance.

In response to strong market demand for a more efficient solution, Safe Software is the first to provide interoperability for Civil 3D data by extending FME to support reading this format. Civil 3D datasets can now be quickly translated and transformed into information that is immediately usable within municipal geographic information systems.

The Township of Langley, BC, has been using FME for years to solve their spatial data interoperability challenges. When they learned of the new support for Civil 3D data in FME, they immediately recognized how it would improve the efficiency of their compliance efforts surrounding PSAB 3150, the Canadian federal asset management mandate.

"The ability to effortlessly import engineering data into our GIS environment will not only save us time from a data entry perspective, but it will help us get the data out to the maintenance crews who need the information in a much more timely fashion," says Steve Scheepmaker, Manager of Information Technology at the Township of Langley.

FME's new capabilities provide GIS professionals with significant productivity gains and preserve not only the accuracy of the imported data, but also retain further details from the rich Civil 3D datasets. By implementing FME to quickly import Civil 3D information, GIS departments save replication time and preserve the dataset's line data alongside elements that were previously not retained due to time constraints, such as object data and the spatial components.

"At Safe, we're committed to improving data interoperability for GIS professionals so they can get the most out of all of the spatial data they interact with," says Dale Lutz, Vice President of Development at Safe Software. "We're now eager to witness the innovative ways customers tap into the richness that Civil 3D data holds."

Support for Civil 3D is available for immediate use in FME 2010, released in January this year. Organizations interested in evaluating FME and learning more can visit the link below.

Civil 3D at FME

Geo: International