About the FME Spatial Data Transformation Platform

Achieve total spatial data mastery with FME

Spatial data is now critical for every organization, driving more accurate decision-making and planning. But as the power of spatial data increases, evolving standards and the ever-expanding range of formats have become a huge headache. If spatial data interoperability is the pain, FME^® is the answer. With it, you can master spatial data in almost any format.

Easily transform data to use and share

The FME technology platform makes it easier to handle the diverse range of spatial data formats and evolving standards make interoperability such a challenge. With a unified view of your spatial and non-spatial data, you can better meet business goals and required standards, generating new insight across the organization. Solve more spatial data transformation challenges than with any other technology:

• Only FME allows you to transform more than 300 spatial and non-spatial formats.
• Only FME gives you unlimited flexibility to restructure, reformat, and integrate your spatial data.
• Only FME answers the complete range of spatial data interoperability challenges with a single platform.

Choose FME, the most proven technology

Today, FME is the dominant technology for spatial data transformation. It powers our FME Desktop and FME Server software and the solutions of more leading spatial data application vendors than any other technology. It's used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide across a wide range of industries.

spatial data

Also known as geospatial data or geographic information it is the data or information that identifies the geographic location of features and boundaries on Earth, such as natural or constructed features, oceans, and more. Spatial data is usually stored as coordinates and topology, and is data that can be mapped. Spatial data is often accessed, manipulated or analyzed through Geographic Information Systems.

GIS Spatial Data Types

GIS Spatial Data Types

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In GIS, there are 2 basic spatial data types representing the real world:
Raster and Vector

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The Real World 

In this example, our landscape consists of

• rolling hills
• grassland
• lake
• rivers
• forest stands
• marsh

It can be represented as a series of raster layers and/or vector layers.

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Raster Data
In the raster data model, land cover is represented as:

• single square cells

Each cell will have a value corresponding to its land cover type.

Raster data are good at:

• representing continuous data (e.g., slope, elevation, chemical concentrations)
• representing multiple feature types (e.g., points, lines, and polygons) as single feature types (cells)
• rapid computations ("map algebra") in which raster layers are treated as elements in mathematical expressions
• analysis of multi-layer or multivariate data (e.g., satellite image processing and analysis)
• hogging disk space

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Vector Data
In the vector data model, features on the earth are represented as

• points
• lines / routes
• polygons / regions
• TINs (triangulated irregular networks)

Vector data are good at

• accurately representing true shape and size
• representing non-continuous data (e.g., rivers, political boundaries, road lines, mountain peaks)
• creating aesthetically pleasing maps
• conserving disk space

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Different types of data are
stored in different
file formats.

 

images © ESRI