FDO Data Access Technology

Enterprise GIS is an architecture that integrates geospatial data and services and shares them across the organization. It can also be viewed as an infrastructure that extends and enables existing enterprise systems using geospatial data. At the heart of this type of implementation is the most important asset in an organization, the data. Recently, Autodesk created a technology to allow the read, write, and editing of geospatial data sources directly without the need to import and export. This direct access is important because it minimizes data translation between formats and as a result reduces data corruption, or data loss.The technology is called FDO (Feature Data Objects) and besides allowing direct access to your data, it is also an opensource technology. That's right, Autodesk, the company that created FDO, gave the source code to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation known as OSGEO, http://www.osgeo.org/ . The impact of this technology is that it can now allow for Enterprise sharing of data easily by facilitating the centralizing and updating of geospatial data. For example, a user can take gather GIS data from multiple formats and integrate them in a single map. Combining information from ESRI, AutoCAD, Mapinfo, raster formats and database information in a single environment for analysis and mapping. FDO also allows information to be copied from one format to another through an operation called 'Bulk Copy'. For example, common flat file formats like shapefiles and SDF (spatial data files) can be loaded into a databases like Oracle, ArcSDE, SQL Server and MySQL. Once this occurs other users in the enterprise can access this data from common applications like MS Excel and MS Acces.


This minimizes the cost of having to have information locked away from non-gis users and time consuming translation processes. Currently, the main geospatial companies that are applying this technology today are Autodesk in the Geospatial products AutoCAD Map 3D and Mapguide Enterprise and 1Spatial which provides operational solutions to organizations with large spatial databases. By leveraging FDO in your GIS environment your data can live inside your organization while staying neutral to the platform of your choosing. By that I mean you don't have to implement a proprietary platform that may limit how you can extend your data to different users. This is an exciting time when technology like FDO is allowing flexible options to the traditional GIS environment. While FDO stands for (Feature Data Objects) with direct read, write, and edit capabilities and the ability to copy data from multiple formats, I think it should stand for FREE-your-DATA-OPTION.

Good Mapping, Neal

List of Different FDO Providers
http://fdo.osgeo.org/OSProviderOverviews.html

Open Source Provider for Oracle
http://www.sl-king.com/fdooracle/