FME Server as Geospatial add-on for Business Intelligence Querying

Jeffrey Smith GIS Developer Farallon Geographics, Inc.

Gerald Gloskin Director, Data Warehouse ISO Innovative Analytics

  ISO Innovative Analytics needs a way to spatially visualize the output from Viador, a non-spatial BI tool.

  Viador offers many visualization/reporting

widgets, and ISO desires to add a map widget into the environment they are familiar with.

Business Challenge

Technical Challenges

  The schema of data exported from Viador changes depending on the query.

  There are several spatial datasets that data

from Viador may need to join with (States, Census Block Groups, etc).

Viador Capabilities to Leverage

  Ability to create HTML forms that support querying

  Export queries to formats including CSV and

XML

Step 1

From a custom HTML form within Viador a query is made and the results are saved as a CSV file onto a network drive (a location accessible by FME Server)

Step 2

From the HTML form within Viador a URL to a custom ASP.NET MVC web application is constructed and opened within a results page

Step 2-1

The URL contains 5 querystring parameters which will eventually be used as published parameters passed to FME Server QueryString  Param   Descrip3on  SourceDataset_CSV   Path  to  CSV  file  exported  from  Viador  CSVJoinA<r   A<ribute  in  CSV  file  to  use  for  joining  Spa@alJoinA<   A<ribute  in  SQL  Server  to  use  for  joining  FeatureType   Spa@al  layer  in  SQL  Server  to  join  CSV  with  Thema@c   A<ribute  in  CSV  to  use  for  thema@c  rendering  

Example URL: http://iiageot1.iso.com/Main?SourceDataset_CSV=\\equator\rmg\Company_DWP_State_wcolo rs.csv&CSVJoinAttr=State_Code&SpatialJoinAttr=state_abbr&FeatureType=STATES&Thematic=Filing_Status

Step 2-2

Example CSV file schema

Step 2-3

In SQL Server we have written a view that unions all of the potential spatial datasets. This creates a single view we can use as a FeatureType in FME (the FeatureType querystring param is used as a WHERE clause on the TYPE column)

TYPE   GEOM   JOIN1   JOIN2   JOIN3   …  STATES   POLYGON  CA   4065   6  ….  STATES   POLYGON  HI   4061   3  ….  STATES   POLYGON  OR   4067   5  …  CENSUS_BLKGRP   POINT   838478  88as88   fdv   ….  CENSUS_BLKGRP   POINT   993448  98vf66   wsd   …  CENSUS_BLKGRP   POINT   939009  57hf87   dds   …  

Step 3

The custom web application takes these querystring parameters and uses them to build a URL for FME Server. This URL is embedded into the web page that is returned to the clients browser.

Step 4

On load of the webpage we have some JavaScript code that uses the embedded URL to make a request to FME Server

Step 5

FME Server then reads in the CSV file exported from Viador as well as the appropriate spatial data from SQL Server and joins these datasets together in effect spatially enabling the non-spatial data from the CSV file

Step 6

JSON data is returned from FME Server, and then rendered on a map using OpenLayers

The Solution

The Web Application

The Web Application

At this point the user can click on features on the map to view a popup with attribute information.

The Web Application

Notice that the data is rendered thematically, and the application has a legend in the left corner

The Web Application

Data can be exported to KML or Shapefile format

The Web Application

Data can be viewed on top of either Google or Bing basemap data

Cool FME Functionality Used

  CSV reader’s ability to read in a file with any schema into the translation

  Generic writer’s ability to write multiple

formats   Generic writer’s ability to handle any schema

we throw at it

Thank you!

Jeffrey Smith jsmith@fargeo.com Farallon Geographics, Inc. www.fargeo.com 415.227.1140

Gerry Gloskin GGloskin@iso.com ISO Innovative Analytics

Questions?