Learn how Visoro Group used FME Platform to automate and speed up its data processing and integration by 750 times.
About the project
RENNS is the National Electronic Register of Streets Nomenclature in Romania. The RENNS project aims to standardize street names and administrative numbers allocation and make it widely available. Before launching the project, there have been cases in Romania where two streets in the same city would have the same name or the same administrative number would be repeated on the same street. The RENNS project aimed to correct the errors existing in the address system in Romania. This decreased the reaction times of authorities dealing with emergency situations in different places, such as ambulances, rescue, firemen, and police. The RENNS project’s database stores all information about roads, administrative numbers, and additional address data. The company that is responsible for updating the data about the street names and address numbers is Visoro Group. The company searched for a solution that would allow them to automate the data collection and data transformation into formats accepted by the RENNS portal, as well as bulk updates of the database.
Contents:
With over 11 years of experience in Romania, Visoro Group is a company that offers consulting services in Public Procurement, the RENNS project (the National Electronic Register of Street Nomenclature in Romania), as well as in many other areas.
Challenges
The RENNS project (the National Electronic Register of Street Nomenclature in Romania) is used by different public units and authorities dealing with emergencies, such as ambulance, rescue, firemen, police. RENNS facilitates interoperability, data sharing at a national and European level, and gives access to the street nomenclature. Access to the RENNS database and using the data is facilitated through the Internet. The RENNS product has a unique, centralized database that stores all system data. The functional modules that build the RENNS solution are encapsulated in the web interfaces.
Browsing the street names and address numbers is publicly available through a web portal. It allows users to view and use information about the “Roads”, “Address Numbers”, and additional address data collected in the system. Other than storing an administrative address history, the system also shares procedures and administration methods and allows its users to validate and consult street nomenclature. RENNS provides a unique registration of each administration address and equips users with a unique address code (AUC).
Local public administration units are responsible for updating the street nomenclature elements and entering them into the RENNS system. To keep the registry up-to-date, the data should be entered immediately, right after the street name approval or change. Considering whole cities and counties, this can be a laborious and time-consuming process. There are companies that support local authorities in this process and Visoro Group is one of them.
In the beginning, Visoro Group conducted the update process manually. Then, the company decided to change the approach and reached out to Globema, asking the Safe Software Silver Partner for help in optimizing and automating the process. We supported Visoro Global to provide a proper solution using FME, a data integration platform that lowered the amount of work from weeks to minutes.
Solution
The data update process is handled by our customer’s employees who collect the information (such as street and address numbers) in ESRI Shapefile format in the field and enter it into the RENNS system. Before, this had to be done manually. It was tedious and time-consuming work. Depending on the number of addresses, it could take from a week up to a month. Therefore, there was a need for shortening and automating the process.
Data stored in RENNS have a specific XML file structure. XML is often used in systems and web apps of this type. One of the key features of FME is the ability to convert data to XML according to the given scheme. During our collaboration, Visoro Group has provided us with a structural example of an XML file accepted by the RENNS system. Then, our team analyzed the input data (ESRI Shapefile files collected in the field), mapped the attributes, and created the FME script resulting in the correct XML files.
Besides Reader and Writer, we had to use many transformers, such as:
- DateTimeConverter – converting attributes that contain a date to an adequate format
- CoordinateExtractor – extracting coordinate values (both for streets lines and address number points) and adding them as attributes. Next, using the Aggregator transformer, we managed to concatenate attributes such as city and street address numbers according to their place in Reader.
- After eliminating all unused, duplicated data, we used the XMLTemplater which allowed us to merge all our feature data in the XML template accepted by RENNS.
Thanks to the script, we get a properly formatted XML file that allows Visoro Global to load and update data fast.
Zoom in to see the script
Benefits
Before implementing FME, uploading data for a single locality would take about 25 hours of manual work of several employees. Using the FME script, the same amount of data can be uploaded in 2 minutes – that’s 750 times faster! This translates to fewer resources used, lower costs, and the possibility to work in many parallel localities.
Loading data with the FME script also minimizes human errors such as incorrect values or typos that happen when introducing data manually. Even small mistakes can lead to errors that require to be fixed manually which creates even more work. Time spent for introducing data was reduced from days/weeks to seconds/minutes. Now, our customer can deliver correct data much faster using fewer resources.
With the help of the FME solution, we can now skip the manual process of uploading data to RENNS. Because we have implemented the FME solution within the company, we hope that in the future, we will try to automate several processes to optimize the time spent performing daily tasks
Sallai Szilárd, Production Manager
Visoro Romania
The FME solution we delivered to Visoro Group is fully scalable. The script (as it is or with slight changes) can be easily used for any city/county/entire country which city names and address points need to be included in the RENNS system.
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