GIS Implementation Projects

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In addition to the projects that we do where we're sitting down to use the technology, we've also done several where our role was primarily to help in one phase or another of the implementation of GIS technology into an organization's workflow.

Rutgers University Telecommunications

Here's the picture: The Telecommunications Division at Rutgers launched a very ambitious project to upgrade their infrastructure that included laying hundreds of miles of new fiber optic cables, and they wanted to keep track of it all using GIS. A given cable runs from building A to building B. Along the way, it passes through a number of conduits. Groups of conduits are arranged in duct banks. Each duct bank runs from one manhole (or handhole, or other space) to another. It's a lot of information that is interconnected in complicated ways, and it all needs to be accessible from various angles.

For example, the construction group calls Telecommunications to give notice that manhole XYZ is located in a place where they have to do excavation for a new building, so the manhole and all of the duct banks that connect to it will have to be relocated. One of the first questions that comes up is, which buildings are going to have their service affected during this change? In other words, which cables run through those duct banks, and what's the building on each end of each cable? In the old days, this would mean pulling a lot of drawings out of a drawer, reading a whole lot of numbers off of the drawings, and then going and looking up those numbers in various lists.

We put together a database design and a pilot database that enables Telecommunications to answer those questions with a couple of mouse clicks. Open up the map, click on the dot representing the manhole, and tables open up listing the duct banks and conduits that run to that manhole, the cables that pass through those conduits, and the buildings that are served by those cables.

This is just one application. Click a different tool on that manhole and you get photos of the manhole, or engineering drawings, or maintenance records. The GIS database becomes the keystone of a sophisticated document management system that ties together all of the information about the physical plant ... all of the information that would in the past have chased you around the office from one file drawer to another, or picking through documents on the hard drive.

In order to fulfill all of the projected needs, the database had to be carefully planned, and the resulting design pushed right up to some of the limits of the "georelational" database concept. Then in order to make it useable, we had to do some custom programming ... so that the mouse click pulls up the information that's tied to the point where you click.

Not everyone deals with wires laid in the ground. But lots of us deal with a lot of information that is tied to a place. A properly designed GIS database can open up all kinds of new ways to access and maintain that information.