Welcome to our May FME Community User Spotlight! Every month, we’ll be spotlighting a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable to the community. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights!
This month’s spotlight is an FME Community Celebrity…
User Spotlight: Takashi Iijima @takashi
What company do you currently work for?
I am a freelancer, not belonging to any company.
What’s your current job role and title?
FME Consultant
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
I've been using FME since 2008. At that time, I was working in Pragmatica Inc., which is my own company. It became a partner of Safe Software in 2015.
In January 2019, the company joined with Pacific Spatial Solutions Inc. and the company succeeded the position of Safe partner. In the interim, I had been working consistently to spread FME, supporting FME users for about 10 years. But recently, at the end of March 2025, I left the company on good terms, since I got old.
I'm now enjoying retirement life, but would like to keep helping FME users as long as possible.
Why did you join the FME Community?
I thought discussing FME technical issues with other users, including Safers, is the best self-training method. I have learnt many things from the Forums in fact, and sometimes a discussion could contribute to improving FME. More than anything, helping other users is my pleasure.
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
If you want to get a required answer quickly, it would be recommended to share related sample data including source data and preferable translation result and the current workspace you have achieved, as much as possible.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you’ve built using FME.
There are many, but in recent years, the most exciting thing that I built is an automation system for quality checking and translating CityGML datasets, with FME Flow.
What’s one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
It's hard to answer this question, since I have many favourites, but if I had to pick just one, I love that FME supports XML/JSON operations using an XQuery processor.
XQuery is powerful and flexible. I sometimes use XQuery expressions for translating XML-based formats such as CityGML, creating JSON-based documents such as CZML, and so on.
Speaking of XML, I remember that Safe had planned to rename FME to XME many years ago - April fools!
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
Knife, solar generator, and electric lighter. FME wasn't ranked in the top three, unfortunately...
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Vancouver is so attractive, but still Japan is the best for me.
you when realise how obvious the answer is 
