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Safe Software Speeds Spatial Data Access

January 16, 2009 By: Cyrena Respini-Irwin


Safe Software kicked off 2009 by launching a new version of its spatial ETL (extract, transform, and load) software this week. FME 2009 comprises both FME Desktop and FME Server, the server-based spatial ETL platform that the company introduced last year.

Safe's co-founders, Dale Lutz and Don Murray, were characteristically enthusiastic about the benefits of their twenty-first release: faster rates of data conversion, expanded support for multiple data formats, and enhancements to the user interface. The company focused its improvements in these areas to address the staggering volumes of geographically referenced data being produced today, the growing interest in spatial data among users who are not GIS professionals, and the ever-increasing number of data formats finding wide use in geospatial, CAD, raster, database, 3D, and building information modeling applications.

So, just how fast is "faster"? Safe claims that most conversions run approximately 20 percent faster, when compared with the past half-dozen versions of FME; some clock in at 20 times faster (the company uses a suite of some 4,000 tests to evaluate changes in processing speed). Perhaps surprisingly, the greatest improvements were made in the types of transformations that were previously the slowest to execute, such as preparing data for use in Microsoft's Virtual Earth. Murray, the company president, reported that Safe now has a team of personnel devoted to improving speed.

Lutz, Safe's vice president of software development, explained that performance gains of this magnitude can reduce processing times by days, and enable users to take on daunting tasks (such as processing enormous volumes of LIDAR data). These increases resulted from several enhancements, including optimizing the FME 2009 platform to process complex conversions on large volumes of data, and enabling FME Server to natively support 64-bit Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Some gains were realized by improving a transformation algorithm; others resulted from improved memory management. "It's the small things that sometimes have the largest impact," said Lutz.

In an attempt to keep up with the relentless release of new data types — Lutz joked that "the universe creates formats at a constant pace" — Safe added support for Adobe Geospatial PDF, AutoDesk 3ds, CityGML 0.4 and 1.0, IBM Informix Spatial, OpenStreetMap (OSM) XML, and eight other emerging formats. Lutz sees particular promise in the Adobe Geospatial PDF format; as he put it, "consumers of that stuff don't have to be GIS people at all." The company also enhanced reading and writing capabilities for fifteen previously supported formats, including GeoTIFF, OpenGIS KML, and ESRI Geodatabase and Shape.

The changes to the "workbench" (the interface which enables users to define spatial ETL tasks) were designed to help a new group of users — those who aren't GIS professionals — to integrate their own data with spatial data from outside sources. For example, with the new Quick Connect feature, users simply click on the desired output and input ports to make a connection between the two.

Safe plans to continue its nine-month release schedule, issuing the next version of FME before the end of the year. In the meantime, there's no saying what new formats will arrive on the scene — or what new uses Safe's audience will find for its data conversion and distribution technology. "We're continually amazed by what people end up accomplishing and solving using the building blocks we provide them," said Lutz.

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