PMCentral Systems - News & Press Releases

"Intelligent Solutions to Engineering Challenges"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fairfax, VA - 2/2/2004
PMCentral Systems Goes With MapServer

PMCentral Systems, creators of the first centralized project management tracking system using a database, and long known for developing customized relational database management systems (RDBMS) primarily for telecommunications clients, has recently concluded a study of industry trends and technological advances in geographical information systems (GIS).

The purpose of the study was to determine if these new trends and developments have made the addition of real-time GIS features to their systems technically feasible while ensuring that there are no speed sacrifices while delivering data. Additionally, the study intended to ping interest among telecommunications professionals regarding their interest in being able to display real-time network performance and alarm conditions data in both tabular as well as geographical formats. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of adding the features.

In response to customer's demands, in January of this year PMCentral Systems embarked on an expanded development of real-time GIS display features to enable real-time evaluations of network conditions and their display in a GIS. Additional requirements are a panoply of other standard geographic views to include weather, satellite, and the capacity to drill down across virtually unlimited database layers based upon geographical selections.

One of the tough decisions according to PMCentral Systems' CTO, Uwe J. Junge, was determining the optimal map serving application to function in conjunction with the RDBMS and existing other applications that feed the database systems. ESRI's ArcIMS, and MapInfo were both considered, but ultimately not chosen. Mr. Junge noted that "since PMCentral Systems' client base uses diverse technological solutions to respond to business challenges, having a map serving application that was as flexible as the Framework Software systems we design became an imperative element of our choice. The economics involved in using an OpenSource platform were, of course, also not to be easily dismissed. With non-OpenSource applications costing many thousands of dollars, all of which must be passed on to clients, MapServer was the choice that ultimately made us more competitive."

According to information on the MapServer web site, the MapServer was originally developed by the University of Minnesota (UMN) ForNet project in cooperation with NASA and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MNDNR). Additional enhancements were made by the MNDNR and the Minnesota Land Management Information Center (LMIC). Current development is funded by the TerraSIP project, a NASA sponsored project between the UMN and consortium of land management interests.

The MapServer is further the application of choice because MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for building spatially enabled Internet applications. The software builds upon other popular OpenSource or freeware systems like Shapelib, FreeType, Proj.4, libTIFF, Perl and others. MapServer will run where most commercial systems won't or can't, on Linux/Apache platforms. MapServer is known to compile on most UNIXes and will run under Windows NT/98/95.

PMCentral Systems having chosen to develop this new application cluster on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) configuration further necessitated use of MapServer. Mr. Junge said "although we develop on high-end MS Windows machines, our systems rely on LAMP because of the efficiencies of speed and reliability attainable. MapServer fits quite nicely into that concept as we can use it on Windows during the developmental stage to benchmark the minimum attainable speeds and then we move it to the production cluster and take her for a spin to see just how fast she really can go."

PMCentral Systems is on target to release these new features in systems in May, 2004.