The Environment Agency (EA) is in the process of examining various aspects of the National Flood and Coastal Defence Database (NFCDD) system with respect to reliability and performance. One of the aspects examined has been the impact on the performance of their browser applications of both the quality and quantity of spatial data held within their Oracle database. The complexity of their spatial data both in size or precision has a direct effect on both the speed of data retrieval and queries against this data by the user.

The EA has initiated a sensitivity analysis into their spatial data. The definitive objective of the work was to establish that the results of analysis on the data were comparable given the simplification of the data. This would reduce the time taken by the Oracle database to perform spatial queries. It would also mean that less data would need to be transferred between application tiers speeding up image rendering for the map display in the browser application.

The EA worked with 1Spatial to evaluate this re-engineering task. This involved using 1Spatial’s expertise in defining Oracle based data models and their technology to process data. A flowline was developed to combine both geometrical and topological analysis to perform the necessary data reengineering.

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www.environment-agency.gov.uk