AbstractsComputer Science

The research project has aimed to support decision making regarding possible transition towards an up-to-date, sustainable geo-ict architecture based on an analysis of technical factors that influence performance of geoprocessing tools at the spatial team of Statistics Netherlands and experiences at comparable organizations. The current geoprocessing environment is ArcInfo Workstation and ArcGIS Desktop 10.1, although most production processes are conducted in ArcInfo Workstation and its scripting language AML. Support of ArcInfo Workstation will not be continued after 2015. Therefore, migration of these processes to ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 or higher version of this product suite has to be considered. Consequently, the following research question has been formulated: Which alternatives to the current geo-ict infrastructure can be proposed for Statistics Netherlands that meet performance requirements of its geoprocessing activities and are suitable for implementation within the organizational constraints of Statistics Netherlands? Based on studying the workload, resources and performance bottlenecks at Statistics Netherlands, a benchmark has been developed evaluating four geoprocessing tools (UNION, INTERSECT, DISSOLVE and NEAR) to be tested on scalability (using synthetic data), impact of optimization factors available in ArcGIS Desktop 10.1 and impact of big data hardware and new software releases ArcGIS 10.2 and ArcGIS Pro (using real data). A number of administrative processing tools (SUMMARY STATISTICS, FREQUENCY, CALCULATE and JOIN FIELD) has been additionally included for tests with the big data hardware and the new software releases. The results of the benchmark have been combined with migration experiences of ArcInfo to ArcGIS Desktop or ArcSDE from other organizations and held against possible internal and external restrictions and trends. These organizations are Statistics Portugal, Statistics Italy, United States Geological Survey and PBL (Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency). The benchmark results showed different results per tool: Whereas UNION and INTERSECT show the same performance in ArcGIS desktop 10.1 as in ArcInfo Workstation, the DISSOLVE and the JOIN are considerable slower in all higher desktop versions. The selected geoprocessing tools UNION, INTERSECT, DISSOLVE and NEAR did not show improvement with the use of available optimization factors (spatial index, spatial sort, parallel processing environment, compacting and compressing) in ArcGIS 10.1, although the use of optimization factors has not been exhaustive. The most remarkable results showed a decline in performance, for example compression of the input datasets. The NEAR shows no difference between ArcInfo Workstation and ArcGIS 10.1 on the fat client, but showed a big improvement in ArcGIS 10.2 and ArcGIS Pro on the big data computer. The improvement of the NEAR implicates that the algorithm of the tool has been redesigned. The other tools, also a number of administrative processing tools tested for Statistics Netherlands, did not… Advisors/Committee Members: Verbree, E., Bresters, P., Oosterom, P. van.