An Examination of Processes based on Open Standards in Support of Service Location

Abstract

A private telecom carrier partnered with the University of Waterloo to examine opportunities to improve their asset management processes. A reliance on traditional CAD technology made it difficult to generate an enterprise view of operational assets, such as poles and cables, since CAD documents were limited to neighbourhood scale coverage. The CAD documents had to communicate logical and locational properties of these assets. These requirements were often at odds since the elements in these CAD documents were occasionally moved to clarify logical aspects, the most common being connectivity with other telecommunications hardware. Elements within the drawings were also restricted to two dimensions, a legacy of early adoption of CAD technology within the telecom carrier.

Developments in GIS and architectural technology that have occurred since the introduction of CAD offer opportunities to manage assets using enterprise geospatial systems with three dimensional content. Prominent technologies and standards, such as CityGML and Oracle, will be examined to develop a model to support requirements related to service location. A service location for this paper is a site that requires the deployment of specific resources to meet the needs of a service request. Additionally, as location displacement is an issue that needs to be addressed, an evaluation of data quality processes related to location will be presented. The results from this evaluation will then be used to construct a final standards based 3D geospatial service location model, one that should address the needs of the partner carrier.