No.1 in Spatial Data Quality Control
Interview with Mike Sanderson, 1Spatial CEO

The company, known in the geospatial community for many years as Laser-Scan, has recently been renamed 1Spatial. Renaming is not a step a company makes lightly. When there are strong reasons for doing so, however -- confirming the established market position and supporting new business visions and goals -- a new company name that expresses them loud and clear is a wise decision. The new name, 1Spatial, speaks for itself. We took this unique opportunity to ask Mike Sanderson, 1Spatial CEO, to share with us some of his views on the company’s mission and its goals, especially in the spatial data quality business.

By Joc Triglav

In December 2006 Laser-Scan was renamed 1Spatial. It is a brave step to change a company name after 35 years in business. The new name itself sends a strong message to the geospatial user community, reflecting your self-confidence and pointing out your outstanding spatial data management solutions. What are the other important factors behind the decision for the new name?

We have been planning for this event for two years. It is not a step we took lightly, but there were some compelling reasons to make the change at this point in time. We had the team in place to carry this task through and we had established ourselves as the number one in spatial data quality control. The primary driver is that the mainstream IT industry knows our sector as the spatial sector. The relational database players refer to their products in our space variously as Spatial, Spatial DataBlade. This is where we want the company firmly positioned. The company had developed fantastic leading edge technology over the last 20 years and was in fact known for technical leadership. Whilst ESRI and Intergraph, founded at the same time, have gone on to become multi-million-dollar-turnover companies, Laser-Scan struggled to grow and be profitable. Since we took the company private (another current trend in the industry) in 2003, we have been focused on taking our leading edge technology to market as components in mainstream IT architectures.
Another key theme has been the way in which we have changed the culture in the company. We did not want to lose the edge in creating advanced spatial technology but we wanted to balance that with clear go-to-market statements. We have developed a totally different mission. Spatial data volumes are significantly larger than business system data volumes. Spatial databases are now measured in petabytes, business systems in gigabytes. The mainstream IT businesses, including system integrators and a range of software vendors (for example Ascential, Informatica and Pitney Bowes) know the issues surrounding data migration. They do not know the issues surrounding spatial data migration. 1Spatial does.

Mike Sanderson, CEO 1Spatial

Spatial data in petabytes needs automated tools to be managed effectively, to be rendered fit for purpose, and to be used as an enterprise asset. Spatial data is beyond the point where auditing it on a thematic map is sufficient to guarantee its accuracy. We manage the extremely complex spatial data management problems like aggregation (conflation), data reduction (generalisation) and semantic integration.  We have focussed wholeheartedly on repurposing and redefining spatial data, taking into account aspects like data quality, the spatial data supply chain and the need and desire to reuse data to ensure a return on the original investment. This puts us in the premier league of spatial data management players and the name Laser-Scan, even with all its goodwill, no longer reflects the effort, innovation and energy that exist at 1Spatial. Besides, with the growth of CityGML, hand-held laser-scanners are being used to capture building heights and we do not do laser-scanners!

In which main elements have you (re)defined the company's goals regarding partnering, services and your user community?

This is a great question since we have just relaunched an official partner programme. In 2001 we had one partner. Today we have 30+ partners. We have created this channel to market through Radius Topology. Our revenues have grown since 2003 to form 30% of our business. Our partner channel was based on a traditional margin on software model. With the availability of Radius Studio we felt that we were in a great position to create a real community and add to the traditional reseller dimension. We had, in any event, together with our partners created a community where professionals and experts can share market information and collaborate on projects based around standards, interoperability and spatial data quality. Now we can create a practitioner community that can use Radius Studio to discover rules in their clients’ spatial datasets, make an assessment of the conformance, and build business-case justification for enhancement. Hopefully these people will become Radius Studio Practitioners just like Simon Greener (Manifold, Oracle, ESRI and 1Spatial expert). In addition we have extended our partnering to our user community. The 1Spatial Community launch was attended by some of our most prestigious customers like OSGB (Ordnance Survey Great Britain) and Tele Atlas who are also partners. We also recently collaborated with No.1 AIDU(Aeronautical Information Documents Unit) of the UK Royal Air Force to deliver a solution to the Royal Australian Air Force. This was one of the company's recent highlights and reinforced the need to redefine our market approach and continue to foster such relationships.

In terms of redefining our goals, they are really about reaffirming our commitment to standards. We participated in the Technical Committee to define the ISO TC/211 topology model. Since that time we have been carrying out real world implementations of what we sought to create. It is the combination of these two approaches that has won us two consecutive annual awards from the Association of Geographic Information in the United Kingdom. Last year it was for our work with No.1 AIDU of the UK Royal Air Force and this year it was for the ground-breaking DMapS project with Property Registration Authority (PRA). This was particularly satisfying as we led a partner team where Autodesk MapGuide technology provided the user interface component. We are now entering a phase where we are back defining standards, this time in relation to spatial data quality. Last week, for example, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee unanimously voted to form a Working Group to look specifically at spatial data quality. 1Spatial’s Graham Stickler is to chair that Working Group.

Why is your approach to be independent of specific GIS technologies and promote interoperability between spatial systems so important?

Our approach is to be neutral. That is because it is based on a data-centric view of the domain. Over the last 20 years organisations have invested significantly in collecting and managing spatial data using a variety of techniques and tools. They have paid to integrate this data with their business processes, they have paid to train their operators and engineers on a range of GIS software tools, and they have paid directly and indirectly for the data. No organisation can afford the cultural implications or costs associated with a 'rip and replace' approach. Our initial response to this was to drive interoperability with initiatives like the Open Spatial Enterprise with Autodesk, Intergraph, MapInfo and Oracle. This has fed directly into OGC standards for text handling.

With our focus on spatial data quality, it became apparent to us that we could offer quality assessments irrespective of the GIS tools. Therefore interoperability moves to the data layer. There is a huge growth in spatial data information: Google, RFID, the arrival of true location-based service and, to quote Antti Jakobsson (see Spatial Data Quality, Shi, Fisher, Goodchild, 2002), "Customers are no longer professionals who know how the information is gathered and know what to expect'. Or, to put it another way: "Geographic datasets are increasingly being shared, interchanged and used for purposes other than their producers’ intended ones." (Introduction, ISO 19113).

So our partner community relaunch was based on the provision of a data access bridge from Radius Studio to the Open Source community via FDO (Feature Data Objects) and the OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation).

This means that industry professionals who want to maintain their huge investment in spatial data, tools and training will have the ability to assess the quality of their spatial data across the Web for a very small cost. This is the basis of our interoperable data approach. It is also available to the academic community so that they can further their research using interoperable components derived from millions of lines of code developed over the last 20+ years and a groundbreaking approach to tackling the semantic integration issues facing our industry.

Where are you directing your main resources in the field of research and development? In your opinion, where should the geospatial industry concentrate most of its research and development efforts to best serve its user community?

There are three main areas.

1. The first is topology. We have always maintained that persistent server-side topology was the only way to manage enterprise spatial systems. With organisations like Oracle, the US Census Bureau and Tele Atlas all using and advocating the same approach, we know that this is an important area.
2. We are building on our work with our US partner Laser-Scan Inc. and US Army TEC in developing 3D topology. Another direction is to address the semantic integration requirements for managing the aggregation of the large amounts of spatial data required in Europe to comply with INSPIRE.
3. Finally, and fundamental to everything we are trying to achieve, we proposed and presented a Charter for the Data Quality Working Group at the Technical Committee level of the OGC. As previously mentioned, this was approved by the OGC last week.  This Group will be about the expression of quality rules and representative of quality services that are developing across the Web. Among other ISO standards in the 19000 series, this initiative will encompass the data quality elements and sub-elements set out in ISO 19113 including topology and semantic interoperability. This is where we believe research and development efforts should be made, since the only way the industry can effectively reuse spatial data is to properly define spatial data. Most of this data was once collected for the purpose of making maps. Now it is used for Web-based information systems: it also needs to be repurposed. Before any redefining, repurposing or reusing can be done, organisations need to understand how much data they actually have, what they are using it for and how to measure its quality. After all, what is the point in being able to access and share spatial data if they are not fit for purpose? The purpose, of course, is sharing across the appropriate decision-making universe.

Joc Triglav (jtriglav@geoinformatics.com) is a contributing editor and columnist of GeoInformatics. Surf to www.1spatial.comfor additional information on 1Spatial.

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