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With the release of FME 2010 in January, Safe Software is emphasizing its stated commitment to improve spatial data access for organizations across the globe. In fact, the technology has been enhanced in ways that make spatial data more accessible - and potentially more useful - than ever before. According to Safe, usability enhancements in FME 2010 bring greater productivity for existing users, speed the learning curve for people that are new to the product, and enable faster adoption, broader deployment and creative new applications of FME technology throughout an organization.
By the editors
Greater Data Access and Sharing
Safe Software has reported that nearly 1,000 of the improvements introduced in FME 2010 are a direct result of customer feedback. Users identified specific changes in FME that could help them to improve spatial data access and address their data interoperability challenges.
As with previous releases, FME 2010 continues to expand its support for various data formats and coordinate systems to provide what Safe calls "unparalleled data accessibility" - and facilitate greater sharing. This includes not only adding support for a wide variety of new formats and coordinate systems, but also enhancing the way the software handles current popular formats, including 3D.
For instance, based on customer feedback it became clear to the Safe Software team that GIS professionals are facing increasing demands to share their spatial data with non-GIS users and decision makers. To better facilitate this sharing, many FME users turn to familiar output formats, such as Google Earth (KML) and Adobe Acrobat (PDF), and FME 2010 is designed to make the creation and output of these formats much faster and easier.
According to Safe, FME 2010 now supports more than 250 different data formats overall, further empowering GIS professionals to share information with new user communities. This includes new support for common statistics formats including IBM PASW (SPSS), R Statistical Data and SAS (Statistical Analysis System). The company highlights that this statistical format support opens up a whole new category of business applications for use with FME, ideally allowing improved GIS planning, analysis and decision making.
As has been highlighted many times in the pages of Geolnformatics, there is a growing...