FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Mind the data gap! (Transport for London)

FME World Tour UK – 13th May: Mind the data gap! Using FME Server to refresh out of date GIS data in London Underground (Transport for London)

The London Underground network uses linear referencing to locate assets, restrictions and other features along the track (E.g. signal “1234” is located at 134.16m on the link “ABC”). Speed and clearance restrictions are held as text in an SQL database where specific users access and edit the data through an Access front end. Whilst this data was mapped and loaded to the engineering GIS portal (available to all TfL staff) this was a one-off exercise a few years ago and the data was very out of date.

Enter FME…. Now using FME Desktop and FME server there is a fully automated nightly process to- Harvest this data from SQL and load it into our GIS portal which is available to 1000+ engineers - Use lookups to create clearer (decoded) data for the end-user to consume - Perform dynamic segmentation to take link measures and map the geometry for restriction data - Automatically email data owners about erroneous data not loaded into GIS (e.g. invalid link names or measures). This has brought various benefits to the business: - Data is available to a much wider audience and can be viewed spatially in an easy to digest map format - Data can be viewed alongside 100+ other engineering GIS datasets to help inform decision making and planning - Data is up to date and erroneous data held at the source can be identified and corrected.