• The Hexagon purchase of Intergraph
• Upcoming software
• Future plans

Intergraph is pleased to announce the availability of the new Security, Government & Infrastructure User Forum website.  We encourage you to utilize the forum website as a means of exchanging information with your peers.

Access to the Security, Government & Infrastructure User Forum website is available from any of the product support web pages or via the direct link below:

URL: http://userforums.intergraph.com/support/
Login: Same as your Siebel username and password.

Instructions for using the forum are available from the “Help & Guidelines” link on the User Forum page. Likewise, if you have any questions or feedback regarding the forums please send an email via the “Contact Us” tab.

Thank you,
The Intergraph® Customer Support Team

I’ve checked this out a few times, but haven’t had a chance to dig in much. Looks promising and it’s definitely a good sign from Intergraph.

[RANT]On a complete side note…IF Intergraph would NOT hide their marketing information behind a login and password, then I’d have links to the products. The last I heard, David Holmes had said that he hoped to have at least the splash pages out from login/password shortly after the end of the conference. We’re going on almost a month now…anytime soon would certainly be nice. Actually, I found what I think is a hidden link to a bit of literature on the software.[/RANT]

Anyhow, GeoMedia Fusion is a great tool for doing data cleanup, attribute validation,  and conflation. The schema remodeler utility comes with GeoMedia Fusion and is a stand alone utility that provides you with the ability to migrate data from one source to another and to bulk export from the GeoMedia environment. For those that have heard of Intergraph’s Data Warehousing Tools, the schema remodeler utility is the re-branded (and enhanced) Data Warehousing Tools. Schema Remodeler is one of my favorite Intergraph tools and I almost always use it at least once a week.. As of late I’ve set it up to take my Trimble GPS text files and load them into my Oracle Locator database. In the schema remodeler utility, you can do a number of things including re-mapping and reordering columns from one source to another (think migrating a database from Access to Oracle or SQL Server); exporting a seamless Access feature class into a gridded Bentley Microstation V7 environment; and updating columns using functional attributes, creating a subset of the the data using temporal and attribute queries, and modifying the source geometry using an analytical merge so you can export the Oracle data to create a shapefile (all in one transaction).

When you look at the functionality of Schema Remodeler, it’s really pretty amazing at how much you can do with the utility. Now, how do I compare it to FME? It’s hard to say as I’ve used Schema Remodeler off and on for the last five years and I’ve only use FME a handful of times. In my eyes, they both attempt to do similar things. The biggest difference in my eyes has to do with the number of file formats supported (Schema Remodeler only supports the standard GM data server while FME supports at least 150 different GIS data types) and how detailed you need to get. Schema Remodeler is great for many things, however it’s only a utility. FME on the other hand is a complete software solution. Its so goal is “spatial ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load”. It should also be mentioned that since you can’t buy Schema Remodeler by itself (it only comes with GeoMedia Fusion), FME is actually quite a bit cheaper than Schema Remodeler. So, if you’re looking exclusively for “spatial ETL” functionality, I personally would go with FME. However if you need to do some pretty advanced conflation, a lot of automated data cleanup, and attribute validation, you really should be looking at GeoMedia Fusion. If you do that, it’s really nice to know that Schema Remodeler comes as part of Fusion and may answer many of your ETL needs.

1) Rendering speed – With the release of 6.1, Intergraph merged much of the missing GeoMedia 6.0 functionality in GeoMedia WebMap 6.1. One of these new additions was with enterprise libraries. Now, although I haven’t received too much feedback on the issue, it sounds as if GeoMedia WebMap Publisher (WebPub) will now automatically check the library for a style. If the named style is in the library, that named style will overwrite what has been symbolized in GeoMedia. Long story short, if my line is symbolized as red in GeoMedia (WebPub Admin), but I have a green named style in my library (the named style name must match the name of the legend entry), than my line will appear green in my WebPub site. Well apparently, this checking is really slowing down the rendering performance of GeoMedia WebMap.

Now, I will say that if my understanding is correct, this seems pretty cool. However, after thinking about it some, I’m not really sure I would have that functionality at the top of my requirements list. Personally, I find that my symbology is fairly standardized. Once I have things symbolized a certain way, it’s not changing too much if at all. It has been my experience that people like consistency with the look and feel of their maps. What do others think here? With that said, I would much rather have rendering speed rather than something that would make my job a little easier on a very rare occasion.

2) Remote publishing with an Oracle Connection – There have also been reported issues where if you publish your geoworkspace remotely and you have an Oracle connection in your geoworkspace, then you will encounter issues with hotspots, select by, and other commands where you interact with vectors on the map.

All in all, both are frustrating. The latest word is that these issues should be addressed as part of the first GeoMedia WebMap minor release due out in the August/September time frame. With that said, it really looks like Intergraph pushed to get the GeoMedia WebMap 6.1 suite out fairly soon after the GeoMedia suite was released. This was most likely due to both internal and customer driven pressure. After all, how many users would’ve been happy to hear that GeoMedia Pro was released early this year but we won’t see GeoMedia WebMap/Pro released until September? That wouldn’t fly with anybody. So, Intergraph made a tough decision, but I think one that makes sense. After all, I’m sure there are quite a few customers out there where the two issues above won’t greatly impact them. Of course, it would’ve been useful if Intergraph had made it a bit more clear to the users of the current limitations of the GMWM release.

In the meantime, for those customers that will be impacted by this, I would heavily suggest you hold off until the first minor release. And even after the first minor release, make sure to test on a development server before going production. After all, that’s why Intergraph gives you the free development license .

UPDATE I received a correction from one of my contacts in support at Intergraph soon after making the post. Apparently my initial understanding above (now crossed out) was incorrect. Apparently, Intergraph has only changed the way the symbology data are stored. Before they were stored as part of the metadatabase in a separate table. It is now stored in the LIBRARY table that’s part of any Library Connection. With that said, it seems (at least in my eyes) unlikely that that change is really causing the slowness. However, it’s very likely that the 6.0 GeoMedia symbology functionality that was rolled into GMWM 6.1 could be causing this slowness.

Anyhow, today I finally got the bright idea to contact the county surveyor’s office. They pointed me to the NGS web site. As it turns out, they host survey monuments for the entire nation on this site. Even better, they allow you to download a shapefile with the control points. So next I’ll be loading the shapefile into GeoMedia and then writing a couple of simple functional attributes to translate from lat/long to California State Plane coordinates. After that, I’ll be able to shoot the survey monuments and finally double check the horizontal accuracy of my GPS systems.

Not very GeoMedia related, but did want to pass the site along to others looking to do something similar.

1) CSF2ASCII.exe – This tool will read any .csf file and write out the contents (projection information out to a a ASCII text file or an HTML file. This is also available in the download widget on the left hand side of the screen.

2) Database Inventory – This will analyze any warehouse connection and provide a complete list of the GeoMedia objects that are available in the connection. I found this one a bit hard to use…but it could definitely be useful if you needed to get a better feel for the contents of a new connection…especially a database. Great for documentation and learning. This too can be downloaded from the widget on the left hand side of the screen.

Reply and let me know!

As I’m sure you all know, the real power of a wiki is the ability for many people to collaborate. So, with that said, I’d like your feedback.

1. Would you find it useful?
2. Would you help edit it?
3. Would you add your own content (e.g. examples, workflows, ideas, etc).
4. Would the requirement that you had to login turn you off from editing/adding content?

Please provide your feedback as I could really see this happening…if there’s enough interest.

Thoughts?