Visualising Your Data, Your Way, With Metrix
When working with asset data, the best assistive technology you have is spatial data. Good spatial data alongside your asset information will provide certainty over the location, extent, limits and relationality of your registers. Historically however, users faced a number of challenges when attempting to work with spatial data, including:
- Knowledge barriers: Working with spatial data has often required specialist knowledge and skill. Understanding of spatial feature types, data attribution and more, often prevents people from getting started with theming spatial information.
- Technology barriers: In order to work with spatial datasets, users have needed access to complicated, and often expensive, GIS tools to achieve results. Such software also adds to the above knowledge barrier as each application has its own set of methods to generate themed spatial maps.
- Currency/Accuracy barriers: Oftentimes, our generated maps are out of date the second any new information comes along. This is caused by the ‘siloing’ of data in different applications across the organisation. For example; asset information in system A, and spatial data in system B. This can lead to decisions being made on inaccurate stale data.
- Missing Data barriers: From time to time, missing information is exactly what we are looking for. Many applications will not show a spatial feature if the specified theme attribute is empty. This can cause countless issues with data validation and decision making.
How can Metrix help?
The Metrix Asset Management Solution overcomes all of the above barriers in a simple to use, pre-configured, yet adaptable, web based interface. With a single button click, users can switch between a large range of different map styles. From condition profiles to custom data reviews, every single map theme is just a mouse click away.
Below are just a few examples of using pre-styled map themes within the Metrix Asset Management system.
Thematic maps to help with Renewal Planning.
When it comes time to allocate your upcoming renewal budgets, there are many different factors that need to be considered. The Metrix Asset Management system has covered these bases with several out of the box map themes, including:
- Condition: Displays all data themed by Component condition.
- Construction Year: Shows all data with a colour based on the year of construction for each component.
- Intervention Year: Similar to the above ‘Construction Year’ theme, however, this style focuses on the most recent intervention event for each component.
- Residual Life: Breaks the components into percentile ranges of remaining residual life and displays the features according to these ranges.
- Years since last Intervention: Breaks the components into ranges of decades since most recent intervention and displays the features according to these ranges.
Thematic maps to help with Data Cleansing.
For users embarking on data cleansing journeys, it can be difficult to monitor what areas you have yet reviewed and those that have already been reviewed. Sometimes also, there isn’t time for a full review of a dataset – users just need to be able to quickly check for anomalies. For this, spatial analysis is the best solution.
- Metric Information: Users can choose between several metric data points (such as length, width, or area) to theme their map view by. Missing or empty values will be mapped as greyed out elements, allowing users to track and fill those gaps. This method of viewing data is also very useful for catching data outliers – eg; a 10m wide pavement in the middle of a long stretch of 5m widths.
Thematic maps to help with Everything Else.
Sometimes, we need to display our map features according to a very specific set of information points. Fortunately, the Metrix Asset Management system can cater for these scenarios with a single click as well. Users of the system can utilise the component tagging feature to place components into whatever size or shape bucket they desire. Each of these tag categories are automatically assigned a map theme that users can turn off and on when required.