Integration of ArcView GIS, Oracle, and SDE as Part of a GIS-Based Maintenance Management System for LEMA Company's Water and Sewerage Network

Author: Hassan Kiswani
Organization: LEMA Water Company

P. O Box 940095
Amman, 11194
Jordan

Phone: 962-6-5666111
Fax: 962-6-5680868
Hassan_Kiswani@pmuoms.index.com.jo

GIS is at the core of LEMA Company's corporate plans for improving efficiency in almost every business area.

As part of the overall strategy, LEMA Company has further developed its GIS maintenance management system (MMS), by integrating it to manage defects reports from its new Customer Call Center, as well as from its core network maintenance and leakage units.

The MMS required fast multiuser interactive access to the GIS by staff answering the customer complaint telephones, while giving access to other ArcInfo and ArcView GIS users. These requirements led to the introduction of a Spatial Database Engine (SDE) based GIS, linked to external Oracle databases, all mounted on a Windows NT platform. A number of call center and operational staff have direct network links via ArcView GIS to SDE. The core ArcInfo GIS running on UNIX is also networked to SDE; this unit has responsibility for updating the basic network drawings and the cadastral maps. The maintenance of the system requires not only integration but also data integrity between GIS features and the RDBMS data.

The introduction of the integrated Windows NT, UNIX, SDE Oracle, ArcInfo, and ArcView GIS systems was a complex problem in an environment where GIS/IT is still fairly early in its development cycle. It meant that LEMA and InfoGraph, the local Esri agent, had to work as a team to respond to the development challenge and to make sure that the solution was user-friendly for end users with no IT experience in the operational units of the water company.