GTI has provided a product called
GTMetaExp, short for GT/Metadata Explorer, since 2008 and it
currently comes in two flavors:
Intergraph G/Technology and Bentley.
The G/Technology version is significantly more advanced and provides the
most functionality, but the Bentley version as well as the Oracle Spatial Loader are related
products that are also available that also deserve mention. I wanted to provide a post that covered
the history of the these products and how they may be
useful to you.
G/Tech Loader
Before I can talk about GTMetaExp, the history of the G/Tech
Loader for GTViewer must be discussed since it is the origin of most of the
technology we use to deal with G/Tech data.
GTI has been exporting Intergraph’s G/Technology data for viewing in GTViewer
since 2002, and we have had 4 generations of G/Tech Data Loaders. Utilizing only the Oracle data, the GTech
Loader will query the relevant data to create all of the GTViewer data files
(.gtg, .gtn, data.txt, data.idx, etc.).
The First Generation loader was fairly simple and was
essentially a custom VB6 app that we created for each separate dataset we
exported. We did use the G/Tech metadata
to style the geometry, but it was a semi-manual task and the style rules were
basically converted to VB6 syntax and processed by the application. As
primitive as this application was, we only recently upgraded an early G/Tech
user to the current version of the Loader, so it turned out to be very capable at what it
did.
In 2004, we introduced a new version of the G/Tech
Loader. This version is more correctly
classified as a CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool because instead
of loading the G/Tech data, it used the G/Tech metadata to generate the code needed
to build the original VB6 custom G/Tech Loader application. The end result was essentially the same as
the First Generation G/Tech Loader, but the effort required to implement it for
a new dataset was radically reduced.
In 2007, we introduced the Third Generation G/Tech
Loader. It was completely rewritten from
scratch and utilized .NET instead of VB6.
This iteration of the loader ditched the CASE tool approach and
dynamically integrated the use of the G/Tech Metadata to produce a higher
quality exports for GTViewer. There were
many design changes in this generation of the loader, primarily the G/Tech
Style Rules were evaluated internally by the loader as it exported the data using
the G/Tech Style Rule name for each feature as a GTViewer Style Rule. This change allowed a much easier way to
tweak the styles used in GTViewer without having to reload the data. Somewhere in this time frame, the G/Tech
Styles switched from blobs in the database to relational definitions, and the
loader adapted to this change as well. Tools
were also provided to generate GTViewer Style Definition files form the G/Tech
Style entries.
In 2011, we introduced the Forth (and current) Generation
G/Tech Loader. While several new
features were added, the main changes were centered on switching from the
G/Tech 9 Relational Geometries to G/Tech 10 Object Geometries.
Pre-GTMetaExp
So what does the GTech Loader have to do with
GTMetaExp? Well, all of our work that
went into building the G/Tech Loader produced a set of tools that did many
different things with G/Tech data: dealing
with Metadata, reading geometries (relational and object), computing styles for
features, and composing and decomposing features.
Over the many year span of GTech Loader development, several
tools were created to help us internally validate converted data or sift
through the mounds of metadata to see what needed to be loaded.
The first tool created was the Legend to Style Tool. It basically
provided a GUI to let you point and click navigate from a Legend all the way to
a Style.
Another tool was the Feature/Component
Tool. It let you point-and-click
browse G/Tech Features and Components along with Database attributes for the
tabular records.
Another tool was the Style Definition Tool which allows you to browse GTech styles and convert them to GTViewer style
definitions.
Introducing GTMetaExp
All of these tools described above were very useful for
their specific purpose. In 2008, these
tools along with some additional functionality were bundled together to create
the GTMetaExp Version 1. This tool was primarily for internal use,
but interest from our users prompted us to productize it and make it available
to others. In 2011, GTMetaExp Version 2 was made available to support both G/Tech 9’s
relational geometry and G/Tech 10’s object geometries as well as other
differences between the two.
The individual tools we had created to support the
development and operation of the G/Tech Loader became tabs in the GTMetaExp application: Feature
to Style, Feature and Components,
and Styles. We added new tabs for Picklists which let you browse and modify picklist values in the
metadata; Validation which lets you
perform various validation routines against the metadata and data, and Export which will export various parts
of the metadata to a .MDB or .CSV file (so it can be used in other
applications).
Find Feature
The most powerful feature we have added to GTMetaExp is the Find Feature tab which is technically dealing with the Feature Data
instead of the Metadata. Find Feature
allows the user to query for a feature by its attributes or its G3E_FID value. Once a feature is found, you can perform a
variety of tasks with it: Attribute Info,
Style Rule Info, Geometry Info, Connectivity Search, Trace
Info, and Ownership Info.
Attribute Info –
This tool will show an Attribute Info Dialog for the selected feature much like
the one in GTViewer. One nice feature of
this tool is that it can show you the User Name for the Table and Attributes,
and it can show you the actual database names as well.
Style Rule Info –
Understanding why a style rule is firing for a particular feature can be a particularly
useful piece of information. This tool
shows all of the style rules used for a specific feature’s components and highlights
the rules that were used. If you
believe that one of the previous rules should have been used, you can select it
and press Explain and it will give a
detailed analysis of why that rule was or was not selected.
Geometry Info – This
tool will show you all of the Geometry information for a specific feature
including the elements in a geometry, oriented points for labels and symbols, and
can provide the SDO_GEOMETRY as ASCII for a given feature (if you wish to
manually make modification in Oracle).
This tool is extremely useful for isolating problems with
geometries and also provides a graphical preview of the element. While the screenshot below
shows an Object Geometry used with G/Tech 10, the relational Geometry is also supported:
Connectivity Search and Trace Info– In FRAMME and G/Technology, connectivity is maintained in
a separate connectivity table and really has no relationship to the actual
graphics other than the nodes associated with the graphics and connectivity info. Therefore, a variety of connectivity problems
can arise where the data looks graphically correct, but the connectivity is not
and tracing will not operate correctly.
Two tools are provided to assist.
Originally the Connectivity
Search was provided to allow you to graphically illustrate all features
connected to the selected feature and then allows you to step out one feature in
all directions as many times as you want.
This tool can show a node view and a feature view to easily determine
how the features are actually connected in the connectivity table.
·
Recently,
a new feature called Trace Info has
been added that will let you Trace from the selected feature step by step in a
particular direction. If there is a
decision in the trace direction, you can choose the path to take. This tool shows both a tabular view of the
connectivity information (with color coded nodes) and a corresponding geometry
view (showing the geometry of the actual feature) which makes identifying
problems much easier. You also have the
choice of a Feature View and a Node View.
Ownership Search – Like the Connectivity
Search, the Ownership Search starts
at the connected feature and traces the ownership of the related features as far as they will go and draws a diagram of the relationships.
Additional GTMetaExp
Features
GTMetaExp provides
such a large array of features it is sometime hard to categorize them. Here are a couple of useful features that are
also available: Style Usage Reporting
and GTViewer Query Builder.
Style Usage Reporting – Select a Legend, and Feature
(or even a specific component), then get a summary of all styles used. Each
feature in the dataset will be evaluated against the Style and Label Rules
while statistics are kept and then used to produce a summary report. These reports can identify anomalies that are
hard to find otherwise.
GTViewer Query Builder
– prior to the
Query Builder add-on app for GTViewer, a query builder was added
to GTMetaExp to build GTViewer queries with the G/Tech metadata. While not as sophisticated as the Add-On
app, this feature may still be useful.
GTMetaExp for
Bentley Data
There is also a GTMetaExp for Bentley data that will read the
metadata .XML files and Oracle Spatial.
While this application is significantly less feature-filled than the
G/Tech version, it does provide a great deal of information for Features,
Criteria, and Domains. Also, the Find
Feature functionality is available and includes Geometry Info and
Symbology Info (which are very similar to those in the G/Tech version).
Oracle Spatial
Loader
After the addition of Object Geometry support to the GTech Loader
and GTMetaExp, a new Loader for Oracle Spatial data was created from some of
the already developed components. The Oracle Spatial loader is a scaled down version of the GTech Loader (no metadata), but it has the ability to
define styles based on expressions of feature attributes, and it also provides a
Query feature that is similar to the Find Feature in GTMetaExp. If you have Oracle Spatial data that you need
to use with GTViewer, this application is an alternative to FME.
Summary
The product timeline for GTMetaExp, GTech Loader, and the Oracle Spatial Loader and the related projects
are shown below:
• 2000
- GTViewer
• 2002
– G/Tech Loader - Gen 1
• 2004
– G/Tech Loader - Gen 2
• 2007
– G/Tech Loader - Gen 3
• 2008
– GTMetaExp ver 1 (Relational Geo)
• 2010
– Oracle Spatial Loader
• 2011
– G/Tech Loader - Gen 4
• 2011
– GTMetaExp ver 2 (Object Geo)
• 2012
– GTBentleyMeta Explorer
