The FMEvolution of China Mobile
Remember the Motorola DynaTAC8000x? Perhaps not by name, but in 1984, the “Brick Phone”, as we fondly remember it, completely transformed the future of communications. Weighing in at almost 2 pounds, 10 inches tall (without the rubber antenna), and with a price tag of $3,995 USD, it was the world’s first handheld cellular phone. Fast forward to 2010, and the mobile market is a whole different world. Now your cell phone probably fits in your pocket and gives you directions on how to reroute around a traffic jam that it already “knows” about. And cellular communications, once a luxury, are now a critical component of everyday life.
As a wireless service provider, Liaoning Mobile Communications, a division of China Mobile, needs ongoing, mission-critical, real-time spatial data for analysis and early warning. The solution? FME Server, implemented by the experts at Safe partner, Beijing Antu I2M Co Ltd.
Liaoning Mobile had three key requirements. One – find a way to extract business information from their databases and present it as KML in Google Earth. Two – present this information dynamically, in real-time. Three – give end users a variety of visualization and analysis choices, such as 3D spatial bar graphs, Thiessen polygons, and contours.
With FME Server at the core, Beijing Antu designed a workflow that would accomplish all three of these goals. FME extracts the data it needs from various database sources and transforms it, manipulating, reprojecting, and building the 2D and 3D geometry that end users want to see. The results are again transformed, this time into KML.
FME Server also facilitates communications between the data source and the client – in this case, Google Earth and Google Maps™. End users can instantly access and see the latest information that they need to make decisions. In the future, the same infrastructure is ready to support even richer client-side applications.
In the ever-evolving world of wireless communications, FME Server is enabling real-time solutions, connecting diverse data sources to diverse clients, and in a multitude of languages. To learn more about what FME Server can do, visit fmepedia at safe.local/FMEServerExamples.
