INSPIRE-d: This is the Year of Transformation
The INSPIRE 2010 conference in Krakow this year was wonderful. Having spent the week at the conference with 670 other attendees I leave feeling even more excited about the importance of transformation and the direction of Safe. Indeed the developments I’ve seen summarized at this year’s conference could make this year be considered “the year of transformation!” and in connection I left the conference with three related thoughts.
1. Transformation is Everywhere
Transformation comes under many different names. During the conference I kept a running list of the different names that are really just transformation, and here they are:
- Semantic Translation
- Syntactic Translation
- Schema Translation
- Data Harmonization
- Schema Harmonization
- Geometric Harmonization
- Semantic Harmonization
If anyone has come across other terms that are transformation, let me know and I will add it to my list.
2. Transformation for Data Quality Assurance?
One leading use of transformation is to perform automated conformance checking of data to determine its fit for use or quality. Check out this example. In this scenario data validation is deployed as a convenient web service. This demonstrates how transformation can be used to define rules against which uploaded data is checked, returning to the user an error report in a repeatable and automated fashion.
Data quality assurance, after all, is “All About Data”!
3. FME is All About Transformation!
Our recent announcements about our INSPIRE prototype along with our OGC CSW demo received a great deal of attention and left some wondering if our direction has expanded beyond transformation. It hasn’t.
Our direction concerning Spatial Data Infrastructure technologies is the same as it is with other technologies. That is, we are focusing only on what we do best; transformation, and leveraging the great work of others.
We are not as some wondered putting resources into creating our own OGC compliant services, but instead are working to plug into and consume the OGC services of others. This approach is consistent with our strategy with other technologies such as databases, file formats, web formats, and visualization/editing tools. We are agnostic, leaving it to users to decide what is best for them.
Are you a provider of OGC web service technology? Do you use technology that you would like us to support? Let us know! After all we know that while transformation is necessary for success in SDI’s such as INSPIRE, it is not sufficient and must work in harmony with other technologies.
FME is not about formats, it is about making format irrelevant! We do transformation so that users can get data the way they want it! Again, one thing you can be sure of is that to share your data in an SDI shared schema you are going to need transformation! This is true regardless of format!
I would like to hear about your experiences with the power of transformation.
How are you deploying transformation?
(Note: you may also want to read my earlier posts on transformation: part 1 and part 2)
Related posts:
Update: I see that Geoff Zeiss has written about the INSPIRE conference on his blog. If you’re interested in reading more about what happened there, check it out.
http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2010/06/inspire-conference-2010-geospatial-cloud-computing-and-social-networking.html