Case Study of the Opole City Hall
About the Project
Discover how the FME Platform supports the daily operations of the City of Opole in effectively managing its drone fleet.
Contents:
Located in Upper Silesia, Opole is one of the oldest cities in Poland.
It was founded in the 10th century and granted city rights in 1217. Today, Opole is home to over 126,000 residents (according to Statistics Poland – GUS). The city serves as the capital of the Opolskie Voivodeship.
The History of Spatial Information System (System Informacji Przestrzennej – SIP) Development at the Opole City Hall
2016
A dedicated Spatial Information System team is established at the Opole City Hall.
2017
The city transitions away from its previous approach to the system’s management.
Until then, all updates to the system were outsourced to an external company, resulting in high costs. Consequently, the city decided to take full control of the SIP operations in-house.
2018
The city fully adopts FME for SIP operations.
Starting 2018, the City Hall began expanding its use of the FME Platform. It updated and modified its licenses to better meet the needs of municipal staff.
The Challenge
The Opole City Hall operates:
The City Hall was tasked with creating a Registry of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV Registry) and was in search of a suitable solution. It was crucial for the registry to meet several key criteria:
- Present geographical data (e.g., topography, river networks, transportation infrastructure such as roads and railways, land cover, and settlement networks).
- Include map marginalia (e.g., map emblem, sheet name, legend, scale and linear scale bar, and cartographic grid).
- Offer the ability to assign different levels of access permissions.
- Allow data input directly from the field, for instance via a mobile phone.
- Feature both a mapping component (with the ability to retrieve the phone’s current GPS location) and a tabular component.
- The implementation of the solution should not incur any additional costs for the City Hall—neither during deployment nor in subsequent operation.
The City Hall also had a number of technical and functional requirements for the solution that would be used to build the drone registry.
The Solution
With the help of the FME Platform, the City Hall of Opole developed a Registry of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV Registry). This registry collects and displays all necessary information for the use of drones as part of the responsibilities of Opole City Hall as a UAV operator.
The system consists of several components that enable:
Adding new UAV operations
Displaying information about drone missions scheduled for the current day
Viewing and editing information related to UAV operations at the Opole City Hall and the individual registries:
- Drone Registry,
- Pilot Registry, which stores details about pilots, their certifications, and insurance policies for both pilots and drones
- UAV Technical Registry, which contains data on incidents involving drones as well as technical activities such as repairs, maintenance, or component replacement.
All these functions are carried out via several Workspace Apps built on FME Flow. These are accessible from the Gallery App, which all authorized users can access via a shared link. The Workspace Apps include:
- An app for adding new UAV operations,
- A fully editable registry app, allowing users to view and modify the Drone Registry and Pilot Registry at the City Hall of Opole,
- A technical registry app, enabling users to view the UAV Technical Registry and add new entries.
Access to the system requires an active account on the FME Flow server. Depending on a user’s permissions (e.g., UAV Pilot, Department Head, or Viewer), users may have read-only access to the registries, full editing rights for both registries, or editing rights for only one of them.
The FME Platform in Building the UAV Registry
The City Hall’s registries are stored in databases. FME Form enables the retrieval of desired information from these databases and the display of this data through generated and properly formatted HTML reports. These include formatted tables, overview maps, navigation bars, data entry forms, and other user-friendly features that improve the usability of the registry. Through the generated HTML page displayed on a device, the City Hall can add new entries, edit, delete, and conveniently browse the registry contents.
FME Flow enabled:
- Access to the registry from outside the City Hall network while maintaining control over user access levels (the registry operates on an external domain),
- Easy usage of the registry on mobile devices.
Why Did the Opole City Hall Choose the FME Platform?
The City Hall also prioritized choosing a solution that would be continuously developed and supported. That ensures long-term use, the ability to adopt new innovations, and peace of mind that the system would not become obsolete.
Results and Benefits
Over the course of nearly 18 months of operation, the registry has recorded approximately…
200
flight missions
Thanks to the centralized registry:
- The UAV Coordinator has all the information about the City Hall’s drones in one place—such as their condition, current usage, and the need for servicing or technical inspections,
- The UAV Coordinator also has easy access to pilot-related information, such as certifications, insurance policies, past flights, and upcoming training requirements,
- Services such as the Municipal Guard, Police, or the Internal Security Agency (ABW) can easily confirm that authorized drone operations by City Hall employees are taking place in specific areas. Based on prior agreements, there is no need to obtain repeated permission from some of these services for each flight over designated areas.
Using the FME Platform to Build the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Registry (UAV Registry):
Gives the Opole City Hall full control over the UAV registry at every level—from data collection and storage, through hosting, to the content displayed on the HTML page.
Enables verification and assignment of access levels for users (including permanent system access rights and temporary pilot permissions).
Allows for saving to and retrieving from official municipal databases (both spatial and non-spatial data).
Provides automatic validation of entered data based on predefined conditions.
Allows data to be securely shared outside the City Hall network, including via mobile devices.
Where Else Does the Opole City Hall Use the FME Platform?
In addition to creating and managing the UAV Registry, the FME Platform is used at the City Hall for tasks such as:
- Regular validation of residency data in integration with EMUiA (Municipalities, Streets and Addresses Registry) to eliminate discrepancies.
- Validation and updating of downloaded and received data from various sources.
- Processing LIDAR data to detect buildings and structures not listed in the PZGiK (State Geodetic and Cartographic Resource) databases.
- Periodic processing of demographic data to update the interactive demographic map of the City of Opole.
- Processing flood-related data, including satellite imagery, to develop an interactive flood map for the city.
- Processing data to develop a transportation accessibility map of Opole.
- Conversion and validation of spatial data for the street lighting network using an FME Web App.
- Conversion and validation of spatial data for the telecommunications network managed and developed by the Opole City Hall.
Thanks to discovering FME a few years ago, working with data has become much easier. The tool is highly versatile and supports a wide range of formats. Its continuously expanding capabilities—enhanced by server solutions like FME Flow—enable us to explore new ways of handling and migrating data. In our current situation, we can’t imagine our daily work without FME.
Maciej Sznabel and Bartłomiej Chmielewski
Opole City Hall
Content created in collaboration with Opole City Hall
Authors: Maciej Sznabel, Bartłomiej Chmielewski
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