PODS and APDM Data Model Consulting

A commitment to building open enterprise GIS solutions is one of New Century’s building blocks. A strong supporter of both the Pipeline Open Data Standard (PODS) model and the ESRI ArcGIS Pipeline Data Model (APDM), New Century has taken an active leadership role in both organizations over the years. This inside knowledge of both PODS and APDM helps us recommend the pipeline GIS data model that best fits our client’s needs.

Gathering stakeholder perspectives is critical to the success of a pipeline data model consulting engagement. New Century Software offers two approaches to accomplish this goal: one-on-one interviews and extended workshops. One-on-one interviews can be conducted with senior members of the organization who have a stake in the project. Interviews typically take one hour and include questions covering:

• The individual’s role in the organization
• Their expectations for the project
• Factors that will indicate success or failure
• Key functional features
• Critical features that are mandatory
• Staff requirements
• Enterprise integration
• Their vision and feelings about project scope

The responses are then compared and compiled for use in a requirements workshop. At the workshop level, New Century will guide the discussion towards topics including:

• Overall pipeline database architecture, including development, test, and production instances
• DBA topics such as roles, schemas, permissions, etc
• Specific implementation and design topics to include region, system, subsystem hierarchy, conventions for handling missing data, data sources, and more

Once the scope and project requirements are agreed upon, New Century’s experts can work with you on implementing the PODS or APDM data model and loading legacy data. The end result is an open pipeline data model that can be used with a variety of software vendors (not just New Century Software) and is scalable to the enterprise level.