Cartographic Data Modeling

It's been awhile since my last post.

I have been working on some interesting stuff including building data models for cartographic data at scales 1:300,000 and 1:25,000. This is for a project we are working on with the Federal Office of Topography (swisstopo). For this work I've been using Visio and the ESRI CASE Tools.

We are using ArcGIS 9.2 and taking advantage of the new cartographic representations, so on top of these data models we are also producing representation models for topographic maps (additinoal representation models could conceivably be added on top of the general data models).

It has been interesting to figure out how best to translate swisstopo's object data model and symbol signature into a geodatabase schema, making decisions about feature classes, subtypes, attributes, representations, representation rules, and override fields. A particular challenge has been finding a way to do the representation modeling, since reps (and also annotation) are not supported in the CASE tools. Currently I'm using some C# code to read the "representation schema" from an XML file.

-Cory