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Track: New Technology and Technology Integration
Bruce Stauffer
Advanced Technology Solutions, Inc.
1837 William Penn Way
Lancaster, PA 17601
Telephone: 717-399-7007
Fax: 717-399-7015
E-mail: atsinc@epix.net
Facility and Space Tracking: Using CAD Drawings to Create an Enterprise GIS
Defining Issue: Organizations charged with managing large real estate holdings assemble a variety of databases and drawings to track physical assets, maintenance activities, and accounting information. These applications usually restrict lateral queries across systems, since they are written as vertical nonintegrated RDBMS systems. Moreover, RDBMS environments do not provide a graphic view of facility data.GIS Solution: The Pennsylvania State University and Advanced Technology Solutions, Inc., developed a Floor Analysis GIS (FLAGS) that integrates data from multiple systems using AutoCAD floor plans as graphic themes that enable queries and thematic mapping of building and room data across various systems and associated relational tables.Methodology: FLAGS enables the user to select a building shown as a theme in the Campus View. The name of the building is added to the Campus View GUI menu bar, and the user can then list all building floors that have floor plans available for the selected building.
After selecting the floor of interest, the AutoCAD drawing for that floor is loaded as text, line, and polygon themes into a new Floor Plan View. Room data are then joined to the polygon theme attribute table using building name and room number identifiers. The Floor Plan View GUI menu bar contains several predefined thematic classifications that the user can select to color code the floor plan based on the data characteristics about the rooms on the floor. The user can also click on a button on the Floor Plan View GUI to open up a predefined layout for immediate printout of the current Floor Plan View. FLAGS provides an easy-to-use interactive graphic view and query capability of tabular facility data. The application makes full use of existing CAD and tabular databases without requiring construction of new databases.Software: The application was written for ArcView Version 2.1 using Avenue. Data update forms for Oracle tables were written using Oracle Developer 2000. The purpose of this paper is
to highlight the FAST application and its functions, as well as to review some of the technical hurdles that were encountered during application development.
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