Designing Geodatabases for Transportation. J. Allison Butler

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       Building the agile geodatabase

      Your task will be made much easier if you build an agile geodatabase. This starts by separating the editing geodatabase environment from the published dataset. The purpose of any GIS application is to create information. You have to put data into an application in order to get information out. No single book can show you the answer to every geodatabase design problem given the vast range in possible applications, even if the scope is restricted to a single data theme. So, instead of trying to solve all transportation application problems, Designing Geodatabases for Transportation seeks to solve only one: creating information out of original data sources, which is data editing. The data thus maintained is then used to populate datasets supporting other applications, each of which presents its own data structure and content requirements. The outputs of the editing process are defined by all the other applications.

      Many of the applications’ data requirements are likely to suggest geodatabase design characteristics that work against the data-editing process. What you really need to do is view data editing as its own application, one that creates the inputs to all the other applications, and then follows the mantra that the application determines the geodatabase design. For example, eliminating data redundancies greatly benefits data editing by keeping each piece of information in a single location so you do not have to enter it multiple times. Thus, a geodatabase optimized for editing will eliminate data redundancies that cause extra work and increase the chance for inconsistencies.

      Right about now, you may be thinking that you never want data redundancies, so why is this a big deal? The answer is that no single application may impose the need for data redundancy, but the collection of applications supported by the editing process may. For example, you could have several applications that want to know the length of a facility, some in meters and others in miles. Even if all the applications want the data in the same form, they are likely to expect the data to be stored in a data field under a specific name, such as LEN, LENGTH, or DISTANCE. Rather than store the length in all these different forms and field names within the editing database, you want to store it there once and then create the different versions needed by the various supported applications. There may also be applications that need data derived from other data. For instance, sums, averages, minimums, maximums, and counts may be employed by various applications, such as the total number of highway lane miles or the minimum length of all passing sidings located along a rail line. It is much better to have these values derived rather than enter them directly because it saves time and reduces the risk of error.

      These practices mean the process of moving data from the editing to the published geodatabase will likely involve data transformations, calculation of derived fields, data replication, and other actions. But this process can be automated. In contrast, data editing is a primarily manual task. Work smarter, not harder. You will get better data with less work.

      Going back to the earlier discussion of agile methods in enterprise geodatabase design, the editing environment is typically the last one to be designed and the first to be built. It is designed last because you will not know what data must be maintained—and the geodatabase design that best supports that data—until all the application inputs are defined. It is delivered first because all those using applications will not function until the inputs are provided. Assuming you cannot design and build everything at once, this chronology presents an impossible task, because the agile method assumes that an application’s final requirements evolve. As a result, the geodatabase must itself be agile.

      The core concept of agility is flexibility combined with robustness. Separating the editing and usage portions of the complete enterprise database allows each to evolve independently and to use a structure optimally suited to its needs. Editing involves lots of small transactions that change the geodatabase coupled with a strong need to coordinate edits made by different persons over time. In other words, maintaining database integrity. In contrast, applications involve extractions of relatively large chunks of data. Each application defines a set of data needs and imposes requirements on the geodatabase that it uses. That geodatabase should be part of the published dataset, which receives its content from the editing geodatabase. If you use the editing geodatabase directly, then your application would have to do all the heavy lifting associated with getting the data into the right form. Conversely, if you edit the application’s geodatabase directly, then the editing process has to deal with the data structure the application needs. In both cases, you have editors and users churning the same data, which can often produce surprising results because of a loss of referential integrity; i.e., differences in values across the geodatabase.

      This book provides detailed instructions for how to structure and process data so that it can be used to support applications without users having to separately and duplicatively maintain the data. This book is about enterprise data editing, not within a single office, but across the organization. The data it embraces is defined by other applications. Editing geodatabases evolve more frequently than do application geodatabases. The editing environment is the sum of all application data requirements. As a result, it will probably need to be modified each time any application changes or is added to the list of supported work processes.

      Designing Geodatabases for Transportation describes a geodatabase design process founded on content rather than specific applications. The design of the editing application is determined by the nature of the data to be edited. Thus, the solutions presented in this book follow the general structure of, “If your user needs this kind of data, then build the editing geodatabase this way.” Many of the geodatabase design principles presented here are widely applicable and need not be restricted to transportation themes. All are consistent with good data-management practices and current technology.