After completing this lesson, you’ll be able to:
Jennifer has a problem. She works as a GIS Specialist for a city government. Her organization is facing a significant challenge: how can they get raw crime data provided by their police department into a GIS?
Let’s find out how she can solve this data integration problem with FME through the steps of connect, transform, and automate.
The crime data is in a MySQL database and must be loaded into an Esri ArcGIS geodatabase for public and internal web mapping applications. It has no coordinate system or other spatial data associated with it except street addresses.
A coordinate system uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of a point or other elements on the surface of the Earth.
Jennifer uses the desktop authoring software FME Form to connect the police crime data to a geodatabase. She adds a MariaDB (MySQL) Reader and an Esri ArcGIS Geodatabase Writer, then clicks and drags to connect them. Using FME, Jennifer doesn’t have to write a single line of code.
We changed our product names in 2023. FME Form was formerly known as FME Desktop. FME Flow was formerly known as FME Server.
Next, Jennifer uses FME Form to author a workflow, which we call a workspace, that accomplishes multiple goals:
Using objects called transformers, Jennifer can restructure her data to fit the needs of her destination system.
Schema: a formal definition of a dataset’s structure, including table names, attribute names, and attribute data types (e.g. text, integer, float). You might also hear this called a data model.
If Jennifer only needs to integrate this data once, she can run her workspace in FME Form, and she’s done. However, if she needs to load data continuously, she can publish it to FME Flow. With FME Flow, she can run her workspace automatically whenever new data becomes available. She also sets up email notifications for the FME Flow administrator when the workspace succeeds or fails.
If Jennifer didn’t want to install and configure FME Flow on her own, she could use FME Flow Hosted instead. FME Flow Hosted is a deployment option for FME Flow that is hosted by Safe Software.
