Hitting the peak of data integration
Author: Rose-Ellen Minchew, Pre-Sales Consultant
I was lucky to be part of the 1Spatial team that went to the FME User Conference (UC) in Bonn, Germany. 1Spatial is the leading Global Platinum Partner of Safe Software, so we spent a total of four days at the UC. One day of partner talks and the other three taking part in the main conference.
Over the three main days, there were just under 150 presentations from FME users, Safe Software partners, and Safe Software themselves. There was a wide range of themes in these presentations, from "How to process your Strava data using FME" to "Technical Information Management at Autobahn GmbH".
I wanted to attend the FME UC for many reasons. First, I've used FME for nearly 10 years. Second, the FME UC is a great learning experience to see how others have been using FME and to learn how to advance my workbenches. As a Pre-Sales consultant, it helps me immensely to have industry-specific knowledge, so I attended some of the presentations such as "FME Provides Access to CityGML in ArcGIS as a Basis for a Digital Twin" and "Suedlink the largest infrastructure project for the energy transition in Germany". All the presentations I attended were well put together and very informative. It is impressive to see how widely FME has been implemented in some organisations and that it is the tool which is used to support business-as-usual operations.
For 1Spatial, we had three presentations:
- Data Assurance Through an Information Management Plan by Martyn Lufkin
- Creating an Automated Mobile Noise Assessment Service with FME Technology by Christian Fellinger
- Model Build ArcPy Into Your FME Workflows by James Botterill
A special shoutout to James, who had people standing in the sidelines listening to his presentation and even attracted the attention of FME Co-Founder Dale Lutz!
As with a lot of industries, there were presentations which used OpenAI in their workbenches. Safe has a new feature in FME 2023.1 called AI Assist, which is designed to support a user in generating regex, SQL, and Python in the Expression Editor, any SQL Statement, or the Python Caller. There are a couple of FME transformers which connect to OpenAI, and with the increasing demand and curiosity of AI, I expect there will be more in the future releases of FME.
Outside of the conference, there was an optional FME Hackathon and an evening social that involved a cruise along the river Rhine and some karaoke. Who knew that the FME user group were such good singers?!
Slides and some recordings will be made available by Safe Software.