Building a scalable water data system for Niagara’s 12 municipalities

Expediting integration and improving data quality in the Niagara Region

Located in southern Ontario, the Niagara Region manages water treatment and oversees their master infrastructure data plan, while its 12 municipalities handle local water distribution and wastewater collection systems.

The water department team wanted to accelerate the integration of municipal water and sewer data with transformation, validation, and correction processes. They also wanted to be able to collaborate with other municipalities to improve data quality over time.

Taking advantage of FME to gain data flexibility

Success of the project hinged on finding the right balance between having an easy-to-operate system and managing complex data. The challenge also revolved around developing a powerful solution that gives users fast feedback while being scalable to meet future needs.

Safe Software partner, Consortech, worked with the team to:

– Develop FME workspaces to extract, transform, validate, and correct data
– Automate transformation, validation, and remediation tasks using an FME workspace to orchestrate the process
– Ensure that FME workspaces can be configured using a configuration file to make it easier to operate the system

Phased delivery allowed for ongoing client feedback, with knowledge transfer and training provided after each phase to mitigate the learning curve.

The Niagara Region now has an FME-powered system that integrates infrastructure data for drinking water distribution and wastewater management from external suppliers within their territory. Leveraging configuration files, they can also use the same system to transform, validate, and correct other types of data, providing added flexibility with what can be achieved using FME.