New Tools for Integrating Enterprise Geospatial Data--Palm Beach County, Florida: A Case Study

Author: William Holland
Organization: Organization: GeoAnalytics, Inc

1716 Fordem Ave
Madison, WI 53704
USA

Phone: 608-241-7100
hornberger@geoanalytics.com

Palm Beach County's use of GIS reflects the state of commercial GIS software. No one GIS vendor's software solutions meet the needs of all possible circumstances. Agencies and their users recognize this and have implemented those technologies that make sense for their particular requirements. The problem then becomes one group maintaining geospatial data that another group needs, but the data is stored in specific vendor native formats, presenting challenges in the exchange and sharing of data.

In recent years, GIS and database software providers have also realized this obstacle to enterprise data access. In response, the Open GIS Consortium, with membership from main GIS and database software providers, has been working toward the development of a set of specifications that address interoperability. From the work of the Open GIS Consortium and development work on the part of software vendors, a number of "universal" solutions have been developed to provide users the means to share their geospatial data between various GIS technology platforms. Actually providing this capability in a particular situation requires the combination of a number of support tools and network connectivity configurations.


This presentation describes the status of efforts at Palm Beach County and lessons learned in implementing a universal geospatial database solution based on use of Oracle Corporation's Spatial RDBMS technology as well as that of Esri's Spatial Database Engine (SDE).