Gümligen, November 2004
TOPOBASE™ Success story in Sweden
In 2000, the company Tekis decided to use TOPOBASE as their basic GIS on which
they would port their existing application used by Municipalities.
After only 6 months of development, Tekis was able to offer their customers
a next generation GIS software applying to all the modern requirements like
the open data storage in Oracle Spatial, the OGC conform data access mechanisms
and the easiness wherewith the application can be modified and extended, eventually
by the customer himself. The “old” user interface didn’t
change and the customers could continue working as they were used to, hence
the data integrity and management tremendously improved. Besides new functionality,
like Topology and Jobs (Long-term Transactions), TOPOBASE offers unknown possibilities
regarding interoperability. In addition to our preferred graphic front-end
MAP from Autodesk, TOPOBASE supports other various graphical front-ends like
ArcView, MapInfo, MicroStation and others. Meanwhile over 350 Licenses are
sold in Sweden.
The following report describes the use of Topobase at Hässleholm in Sweden.
Hässleholms Municipality
Hässleholm is a municipality with almost 50’000 inhabitants located
in the heart of Swedens most southern region, Skåne. Hässleholm
has a history of using AutoCAD-based systems for parcel and water management.
Hässleholm started to use Topobase in 2002, when the software was released
in the Swedish market. They converted data from their previous system, which
also was Oracle-based, into Topobase. “We have always wanted to work
with new technology”, says Jan Karlsson, head of the GIS and Mapping
department. “Over the years we have made many mistakes by taking on
software too early, but we have also learnt a lot”.
Different clients – the same data
Today Hässleholm mainly use Autodesk MapGuide and Autodesk Map as clients
towards the Topobase data. In the future they believe they will be using other
clients. “We have ESRI-clients for GIS analysis within our organization,
and coming into the 21st century we cannot see any reason why different clients
couldn’t read the same kind of data from different sources”, Jan
Karlsson continues.
Using Topobase for hosting other municipalities data
Local government is unique in the way that there is no competition between
municipalities. Neighboring municipalities often try to help each other out.
“We have an agreement with our closest neighbors, Osby and Östra
Göinge, to host their data”, says Jan Karlsson. “We provide
the whole back-end, servers and all. Having a scalable solution makes this
easy for us. Especially since Topobase is not the only application that we
host, we also host applications from our local partner Tekis for local demographics,
parcel information database systems, and systems for building permits”,
Jan continues.
Stefan Svensson from Osby agrees that there would be no way for a smaller
municipality to have such a mature system. “With Hässleholm hosting
our data, we can focus on the data itself and usage of the information. Autodesk
MapGuide allows us to distribute critical information within our organisation”,
he says.
Fig. 1: MapGuide Image – Osby city centre.
Delivering data to the Swedish National Cadastre
The Swedish National Land Survey, Lantmäteriverket (LMV),
buys cadastral and parcel data from Swedish Municipalities. “There are
a three different levels of partnership with the National Cadastre”,
Jan Karlsson says. “It depends on which data the municipality can deliver
and the quality of the data. Being at the highest level implies that we must
have long-transaction functionality in our mapping solution. Today the data
is exported via an internal Swedish format, but soon LMV will accept data
in xml/gml-format. In the future long-transactions and gml-export will be
one of the top advantages with our system. Being the first to try new software
is risky business, but we like it!”, Jan Karlsson finishes.
Fig. 2: Parcel map, that may be exported to the Swedish National
Cadastre
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