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Client: Ernst Kemmerer - Forest NSW

Forest New South Wales manages more than 800 State forests for timber production and conservation of the natural environment. Forest NSW is migrating from workstation ArcInfo to ArcGIS 9 which is a fundamental change in data storage and management for the organization. Spatial Vision was commissioned to develop a custom topological editing system for vital forestry administrative datasets.

FNSW maintained all state forest and administrative areas in a single ArcInfo coverage which contains both line and polygon attributes. Editing was performed by skilled ArcInfo GIS operators and was very dependent on documented procedures. The new editing system was designed to build and maintain topology for forestry management units and improve the consistency and efficiency of GIS operators. The editing system is driven by tables in the ArcSDE database that hold settings including a list of the datasets that can be edited and their default tolerances.

The editing interface is designed in a dashboard style, with toolbars and forms arranged around a central map window. Many of the toolbars contain buttons and tools containing standard ArcEditor functionality, but rearranged in the editing interface. The system interface also contains buttons and tools that have been custom-built for this application, such as an edit initialization form that allows the editor to select an area to edit. This selection is based on a number of complex relationships held in three databases, one database being the spatial repository, another commercial forest inventory system and the other containing internally held business tables.

Other custom features include the selection of an edit layer from a toolbar. This event triggers a number of actions, including the adjustment of symbology of the target layer, to make it appear dominant, while the other layers are assigned a symbology to make them fainter. In addition layers associated with the target layer are made visible (others are turned off) and appropriate snapping layers, features and tolerances are set. Custom editing functionality comprises tools to buffer selected line features on a side picked by the user, and a docked window for editing attributes.

A core requirement of the application was that be built to support topological editing functions provided in the geodatabase environment.

The editing system was built for use in ArcEditor 9.1, with spatial data being held in ArcSDE. The system was built in the .NET framework using C#. Recently Spatial Vision migrated the system to ArcEditor 9.2.

Demonstrated Capabilities

• Ability to understand forestry management business practices
• Understanding of the .NET framework, in particular ADO.NET
• The ArcGIS development environment, including most of the ArcObjects libraries
• Understanding of geodatabase topology, its implementation and the associated editing functionality
• Editing ArcSDE data
• Cross database queries

Resources

Ishara Kotiah was responsible for the design of the system and the development of the custom edit tools. Simon McBride developed the graphical user interface.

Technologies Applied

• C# in .NET framework
• ArcObjects
• ArcSDE
• ArcEditor