Geospatial Services

As part of the custom development services offered over the years, WayTo has developed a number of utilities that permit the transformation of data for specific applications. These are not in the form of “products” but are utilities that could be incorporated into specific business processes. The services usually require a problem definition from the client, and are difficult to enumerate. They may be best described by example.

A Gas Utility had implemented a dispatch system for service personnel that was capable of ordering the calls to optimize travel time. The problem was they did not have a location. WayTo built a web service to deliver a lat long for a particular service from the maintained system. The work management system consumed this service nightly, by providing a Service ID, or an Address, and the service would return the lat long. Work management passed this on to dispatch and the calls were ordered appropriately.

An Electric Utility wanted confirmation of the location of the services in the GIS. WayTo developed a technique of finding the parcel, it resided in, compared this to an alternate service location data set from an external source, accepted matching records, and provided a queue of suspect service locations for view and reconciliation.

A Provincial Government department required confirmation of ownership prior to granting a permit on a particular property. WayTo developed a technique to consume a web service written for a different government department, compare/confirm ownership based on the legal land description. The project also required parsing of certain information, as slight variants in standards would reduce the false positive conditions.

The above services are possible, as we are able to deploy a number of capabilities without concern about licensing of product. Thus “Inside” and “Near” functions can easily be incorporated into rule sets. There are also conditions where relationships are such that label orientation has a higher priority that proximity when determining what is being searched for.

All of the projects we provided these services for were presented to WayTo as a problem statement. WayTo was then given the flexibility of designing a process that best suited the environment and culture of the requesting organization.