Radius Studio™ enables users to rapidly analyse scattered spatial data to establish its operational purpose and facilitate its reuse by providing data mining, rules-based conformance checking and data cleaning capabilities. This rigorous control of data quality provides significant return on investment by automating these traditionally time-consuming, ongoing and expensive tasks.

Latest release (v2.0)
The latest version of Radius Studio incorporates several additional features, including provision of the ability to spread data processing across multiple machines via distributing components, such as the Sun™ Grid Engine. This functionality is enabled via web services and allows large volumes of data to be validated against data quality and business rules in a timely and efficient manner, greatly reducing workflow run-times.

This version also introduces application server support for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, in addition to the existing Microsoft Windows XP and 2003 Server support. Another important new feature is the ability to download and upload Radius Studio elements. This means that Radius Studio elements such as data stores, rules, actions and templates can be easily shared between development, test and production systems.

Your spatial data can be certified to enable critical business decisions to be made, safe in the knowledge that it is fit for a particular purpose because it is tested and documented to be so.

Radius Studio is currently being used within Central Government , Mapping organisations and Utilities.

• Concepts Guide
• Product Brochure

Find out about the Radius Studio Practitioner Programme

Features

• The ability to collect scattered data for auditing, assessment and reuse
• Rule authoring using an intuitive user interface
• Data mining techniques to analyse data and identify statistically dominant patterns
• Rules stored as enterprise metadata in an open, portable knowledge base
• Reporting tools to identify non-conforming data
• Minimisation of risk by ensuring data adheres to regulatory or in-house compliance rules (SLAs, ISO9000) or performance measurement (e.g. Balanced Scorecard)
• An interoperable service oriented architecture (SOA) delivered through the implementation of standards (ISO19119)
• Spatial rules engine to automatically fix-up non-conforming objects
• Provides a knowledge management environment by storing all metadata in an Oracle database and providing enterprise access through web browsers and web services.

Benefits

• Ensures data quality; that data is suitable for reuse and a reliable basis for critical business decisions
• Improves efficiency by reducing workflow timeframes
• Minimises risk by incorporating comprehensive compliance and audit checking
• Provides certification of data quality and at-a-glance indicator of performance
• Users who really understand the data can define the rule base instead of briefing programmers to carry out the work, eliminating potential misunderstandings and long lead times
• Allows organisations to be more cost effective and to minimise data redundancy by sharing high quality data for multiple purposes
• Universal access is provided throughout the organisation, empowering any user with the appropriate privilege to define, refine and review the business rules.

Requirements

Application Server: Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 (10.1.3.0) or JBoss v4.0.4 GA
Platform: Microsoft Windows XP, Server 2003, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (JBoss application server only)

Database: Oracle9i or Database 10g
Edition: Standard or Enterprise
Platform: Any Oracle platform

Client Browser: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
Platform: Microsoft Windows XP

Packages and Components

Base Package
The base package consists of the following components:

• Data Source Specification. This enables the user to define Oracle and/or FDO-based data stores to be used within Radius Studio. The data within these data stores can then be accessed to test conformance of features against a set of rules or to re-engineer using the Fix-Up and Reporting component.
• Rule Builder. A rule in Radius Studio is a structured tree of hierarchical conditions, against which features can be tested. Rules can be authored using an intuitive user interface and are expressed in a form independent of the schema of any particular data store. This means they can easily be re-used with different schema and data sources. Rules authored in Radius Studio are stored as enterprise metadata in an open, portable knowledge base.
• Conformance Checker. Detailed XML & HTML reports are generated by the conformance checker to identify features that do not conform
  to the rules. Hyperlinks on the HTML report allows the non-conforming object to be viewed using Oracle Map Viewer and help determine the reason for non-conformance.

Run-Time Package
This provides a Radius Studio component that allows only pre-authored rules and actions to be run in production workflows. This allows organisations who already have the Base Package (and possibly the Fix-up and Reporting Package) to deploy another Radius Studio installation in an environment where rules and action authoring is not required.

Discovery Package
The discovery package allows analysis of a data source to discover patterns within the data. It applies statistical techniques to deduce a plausible set of rules to which the data appears to conform. Discovery – or spatial data mining – is an important part of building a spatial knowledge base. Combined with information from published specifications and knowledge from specific individuals, it can help to identify gaps within the rule set.

Fix-up and Reporting Package
This package allows users to define custom actions to automate the process of fixing non-conforming data, or to produce detailed reports on the structure of the data. Radius Studio provides built-in functions and algorithms that can be used to build fix-up or reporting actions via a user interface without the need for software development skills. Actions may make use of a large number of geometric and non-geometric built-in functions and aggregate values. Once the action has been defined it can either be applied to all nonconforming objects, by mapping the action onto a rule, or it can be applied to all the data, optionally restricted to a specified region.

• Cleaning - Removes geometric errors such as spikes and duplicate vertices
• Conflation - Modifies or creates new features based on their relationships with other features
• Simplification - Performs geometric filtering to reduce the size or complexity of features
• Reporting - Provides the capability to report on data values

Java Extensibility Package
The extensibility package provides a Java interface to allow users to create bespoke routines, which will extend the following sections of Radius Studio:

• Built-in Functions - Additional functions which can be applied to feature attributes for use in the rule and action builder
• Data Stores - Implement new data stores for non-standard data sources

Web Services API
Radius Studio has a full SOAP compliant interface (as recently used in the OGC OWS4 TQAS test bed). This allows usage of Radius Studio to perform rule assertion within an enterprise spatial data environment, enabling the inclusion of spatial data within Business Intelligence initiatives.

Feature Data Objects (FDO) Component
This is an add-on component (from Radius Studio v1.4 onwards) that provides the capability to assess the quality of geospatial data held in a variety of different vector formats. Feature Data Objects (FDO) is an open-source component for manipulating, defining, and analyzing geospatial information regardless of where it is stored. FDO uses a provider-based model for supporting a variety of geospatial data sources, where each provider typically supports a particular data format or data store. Initial formats supported (read only) are: WFS, ESRI Shapefile, SDF and OGR (MapInfo TAB and MIF/MID).

For more information on FDO see http://fdo.osgeo.org/

• Datasheet