Sunday, December 20, 2009

AM/FM/GIS

Automated Mapping/Facilities Management Systems seem to have been GIS's older cousin, developed to spatially display and manage attribute information of associated with an infrastructure network (electricity, gas, sewers, etc.).  This type of software is composed of a graphics engine for rendering spatial information combined with a relational database management component.  An example software title is the GE Energy Smallworld suite.

There's a decent history and evolution in this 2003 ESRI white paper:
Utility GIS-More Than Just AM/FM

Also see AM/FM/GIS on Wikipedia

2 comments:

jwg07c said...

Hey Justin,
I stumbled on your blog and was wondering if you had allot of information about AM/FM GIS in conjunction with land planning. I am doing a dissertation where I compare open source and commercial software in making a GIS for property management. If you have any more information about this topic I would certainly be interested to hear about it.
Cheers,
Jim

Justin said...

Unfortunately, I have little experience with a wide variety of open source GIS applications and software packages. ESRI is all I have time for currently at work. I'd be interested in broadening my horizons on the subject for future projects so I'd be very interested in reading your findings; particularly in turn-key solutions for rapid deployment (for emergency management, or any other project needing a quick startup).

I'm familiar with GRASS, opengeospatial.org, open street map, geodjango, XAMPP + Google Maps, and a few others; however I don't have a ton of hands-on time with these to provide much insight. There are lots of solid web mapping tools that can project free web-based database information: MySQL, django, etc. I've been trying to get into that lately.

I would suggest shooting a message to Joe Larson (joelarson.com) or even check out a few of his tweets. He's a GIS wizard over at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. His specialty is impressive open source GIS stuff.

Good luck.