First Question of the Week! Tell us the first way you used FME.

i discovered for the first time FME by chance in my work. I used it to transform coordinates. I use it for  almost 8 years now and I'm always surprised by all it's possible to do with it.

My first use of it was something fairly simple - building shapefiles from addressing gazetteer data, to do analysis on it from a spatial perspective, look at regional variation etc. Made it so much easier being able to build a bunch of different sanity checks into one workflow. 

I first used FME back 2011. It was purely used to extract and reproject data from GE Smallworld 3.3 to other spatial formats.

Back then, FME was used a couple of times a month and is now used throughout every day.

I started my professional GIS life at a data-broker, selling parts of datasets in various formats to customers, shipping physical CD’s.

Must have been around 2006 when I used FME to select the desired data and convert it to the needed format.

My first encounter with FME was at SFU back in 2007 or 2008 when I attended a workshop given by Mark Ireland (I came for the free lunch). I was fascinated by what FME could do and used it to help prep and convert DEM data for a 3D GeoViz project. 

In 2010 I completed an FME Desktop course from @redgeographics while working at Grontmij, now Sweco.

Since then I have been using the software regularly. But it was during the digitization of cables and pipes in the Netherlands (KLIC) that I started working with it on a daily basis. Our customers provided data in different formats, and the ability to read everything customers sent us proved to be quite useful.

I was introduced to FME by Lars Robertsson in ‘98, at my first job after graduation. I don’t remember my first task but I do remember that UltraEdit was my best friend to handle all factories and functions.

My first stumbles within FME was just simply transformation of dwg files between various coordinate systems, some 15 years ago.

@danielleatsafe That is an interesting ask!

My first first usage of FME dates back to January 2001, when I worked for a HFC/ Broadband Network Design Services Company in Atlanta, USA. Since FME CD used to come packed in a completely black coloured back embellished with the old FME logo, we used to call it the blackbox in our company. I think it was FME 2000 Build 422, if I remember correctly.

I ran a v7 dgn to MITAB conversion automated using the command line script to call a handwritten fme mapping file to convert 18,000+ v7 dgn files to MITAB files for New York area to create a GIS system out of the network engineering data in Focus 95 system.

The conversion was made to run overnight with a warning board on the desk that read “FME conversion in progress, do not switch of the PC”.

The next morning I rushed to the office quite early to check the status and was happy that the process  of 18,000+ v7 dgn files to MITAB files had finished successfully in about 8 hours.

The script also had a three stooges theme music to play, if at all the process finished successfully.

Not sure if someone heard that when FME finished the process sometime early morning as early as 3 AM!

There was an option in FME Workbench to play any sound if the translation was successful and a different one if it failed!

Good old days of Happy FME-ing :-)

SRG

Looking into my archives I found one of my first workbenches.

Wrote a lot of SQL scripts to update features after creating them. Not having FME at first, so everything I wanted to do was an SQL script already.

Codes within the files looked like this (on one row):

INSERT INTO zones.hecto (geom,code,cadfile,cadlayer) 
	SELECT ST_Multi(ST_BUFFER(barrier.geom,0.5,'endcap=flat join=round')) 
	as geom,barrier.code,barrier.cadfile,barrier.cadlayer FROM kg.barrier 
	WHERE code IN ('IA','KW','BR','SA','BE','SP','SC');

Actually pretty effective because the database was doing the work so I did not have to get and write all the features into FME memory.

In this case create the zone of influence from the barrier as line. Another sql line would check if there was something within the buffer.

Back in 2012 a governmental data provider announced to change data we consume from a text file format to an AIXM 4.5 version starting 2013.

We had to ingest the data into an ESRI enterprise geodatabase and we saw of course all our scripts using ArcObjects won't run anymore after the format change.

So we decided to use FME Desktop instead (all the XML transformers) to tackle the complexity of AIXM as well as the capability of creating spatial data for the GDB.

We were successful and as far as I know the workbench is still running today.