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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B4, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
DESIGN OF AN ENTERPRISE SYSTEM 
The enterprise mapping system developed at NWG was designed 
in the context of the preceding paragraphs on stakeholders and 
production work flow. But there were also other requirements that 
impacted the design of the system such as: 
e Scalable to many simultaneous users 
e Granular access rights for various roles 
e Extensible for custom data 
e Data management (copy, edit and move datasets) 
e Task and process management 
e Provide lineage across projects 
e Support metadata standards (ISO and FDGC) 
e Provide easy to use APIs 
e Stable platform to build other products 
e Server and storage scalability 
e Support multiple OS platforms (Windows and Linux) 
The above considerations led the design of an enterprise system 
based on a client/server architecture. At the core of the system is 
an application server that consists of multiple engines and services 
that manage the image data stored on a file server and metadata 
persisted in a spatial database. A web server layer sitting on top of 
the application server allows users to access functionality and data 
through a standard web browser. The system is also designed to 
allow other clients such as XPro or other applications to 
communicate directly with the application server using a remote 
messaging interface. 
DATA MODEL 
By design the data model for the enterprise mapping system is 
project centric, i.e. that nearly each entity modeled is the system 
resides in the context of a project. In addition to being project 
centric each entity is also derived from an abstract base object that 
contains primitives such as timestamps and geospatial extents, 
among many others, as its attributes. In practice, data such as 
images, flight lines, trajectories, acquisition blocks (and many 
more) have knowledge of their geometry and have temporal 
information in addition to the knowledge of their parent project. 
Not only are the standard objects that are directly related to data 
processing modeled (images, sensor, calibration, control points, 
trajectories, etc.), but also auxilarydata such as aircraft id, aircraft 
hours, pilot's name, sensor operator's name, contract requirements, 
etc. are modeled. This allows the system to retrieve information 
based on a complex query. For example, searching for the number 
of hours pilot X has on flown project Y would retrieve a 
meaningful result. This may not be significant information from a 
pure processing perspective, but from an enterprise standpoint this 
may be relevant data for resource management. Generally, an 
attempt is made to capture any relevant data that contains value 
for the company in regards to a project, especially if this can be 
performed automatically without or with only little human 
Intervention. 
241 
IMPLEMENTATION 
The NWG next generation architecture was designed from the 
ground up to support the integrated vision from acquisition all the 
way to web service delivery. It was built using the best of open 
source components and open standards. A composite model of 
following the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) standard 
that is the industry standard for enterprise Java computing with the 
injection of popular open source frameworks when required has 
resulted in an extensible platform. A high level architecture of the 
system is shown in Figure 2. The major components that make up 
this architecture are: 
  
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Figure 2: System Architecture 
Harvester 
The catalogue is able to harvest different kinds of resources 
(image coverages, flight export files etc.) using a simple plugin 
infrastructure. Multiple harvesters were developed using the plug- 
in setup like FPESImporter that harvests the export from the Leica 
Flight Planning and Evaluation Software and FCMSImporter that 
imports the executed flights from the Leica Flight & Sensor 
Control Management System. The different harvesters in return 
use metadata harvesters registered in the system to provided 
metadata from diverse sources for each resource being harvested 
into the catalogue. 
Work Flow Engine 
The term Business Process Management (BPM) typically refers to 
business discipline or function that uses business practices, 
techniques and methods to create and improve business processes 
which are sequence of actions performed by humans and systems 
to achieve a business goal. Some of the advantages of using the 
BPM Systems are automation of the company business processes, 
declarative expression of the coordination between human tasks 
and automated systems and easier gathering of performance 
metrics.