PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
November 2020
657
GIS
&
Tips Tricks
By Dave Maune, Ph.D., CP, GS, PS,
and
Al Karlin, Ph.D, CMS-L, GISP
James Parker and
Al Karlin, Ph.D. CMS-L, GISP
FME Tool Tips
For this month’s Tips & Tricks, I am turning the column over
to a guest writer, Mr. James Parker, with Dewberry Geospa-
tial and Technology Services group. James joined Dewberry
several months ago and was anxious to share some software
tips he had developed with a previous firm. As I am always
looking for alternative ways to perform GIS tasks, this seems
like a perfect opportunity. (I also encourage others to contrib-
ute to this column with your personal favorites.)
FME (standing for Feature Manipulation Engine) is my
favorite spatial data ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) and
automation tool. It’s developed by Safe Software – no they’re
not an antivirus company – who’ll tell you it does far more
than convert GIS data from one format to another. And if
you’re a seasoned user you’ll know that to be true.
I only started using FME about three years ago whilst
working for a very large energy firm. Before I took the job,
I exaggerated my experience with FME, which was pretty
much limited to using Esri’s Interoperability extension and
making a ‘Hello World’ workbench. But I soon learned my
new employer used FME to automate pretty much every-
thing, and I was going to be spending a lot of time with my
head in a workbench. Did I get away with it? I think so. Luck-
ily workbench is very intuitive. It’s essentially a drag and
drop model builder. The basic workflow follows the format:
(1) You usually read some data, (2) manipulate that data, and
then (3) write it somewhere else. When you’ve debugged and
tested it, you can set it up to run on a schedule and reach for
the hammock. This image below is me reading data about a
jog I did from Strava.com, turning JSON into a polyline, and
writing to a feature service on ArcGIS Online. Easy!
So… here are my Top 5 tips for using FME (not necessarily
in order):
1. Keep your workbench clean!
Write every workbench
as if you’ll hand it over to someone who knows nothing
about the data or problem set. Use Annotation liberally.
Use bookmarks to group transformers. Collapse those
groups if it makes the workbench easier to view. Instead
of having crazy long connector lines, tunnel them straight
to where they’re headed (right click > Create Tunnel). Or
at least add some vertices so lines don’t cut across every-
thing else. Use junctions to bring connection lines back
together before they go into transformers. You’ll be glad
you did all this when you open a workbench you haven’t
seen in a while.
2. Apply your style.
Change the theme, label colors, con-
nector line shapes and more. Go into Tools > FME Options
> Appearance and setup things how you like them. You’ll
see from my screenshots I like the dark theme.
3. Setup some background maps to the Graphics view.
You can preview your data on a map at any stage of your
model. But by default, there is no base map. Spend a
moment setting up your favorites from some of the most
common in-built sources. Right click Graphics View >
Background Map. The squiggly feature on the left could
be anything, anywhere. By adding a basemap I can see
it’s a short neighborhood walk, projected correctly.
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 86, No. 11, November 2020, pp. 657–658.
0099-1112/20/657–658
© 2020 American Society for
Photogrammetryand Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.86.11.657
