I would like to thank Hal for the original article and all of the other contributors. The interest level shows how important spatial data are to organisations. We have now been invited to comment so it behoves us to respond. Laser-Scan has been active in managing large continuous spatial datasets for 15 years. We believe that the evolution of its Spatial Type at Oracle 9i fundamentally changed the way in which spatial information can be managed in government and business. A review of the economics behind this assertion underlines our philosophy.

Government the world over has spent billions and continues to spend billions collecting information. According to 'The Commercial Exploitation of Europe's Public Sector Information' undertaken in 1999 by PIRA for the Director General of the Information for the European Commission, the EU is investing in PSI to the tune of €9.5bn each year. The largest single component of the Public Sector Information investment total is the geographical sector. This includes such categories as mapping, land registration, meteorological services, environmental mapping and hydrological services. This sector takes over 37% of the total investment in France, 41% in Sweden and 57% in the United Kingdom. The current economic value of geographic information in Europe alone was estimated to be €35.8bn, and in the US it was estimated to be at least twice as much. This expenditure in spatial data will have accelerated since 9/11.

It seems not unreasonable that an investment of this magnitude is protected and managed in a secure environment. In an environment that also maximises access and utility, particularly because of the role that geographic information plays in security, joined-up Government and services for the citizen. This joined-up dictum cannot be achieved without guaranteed data quality. Laser-Scan uses ISO 19107 standard topology to deliver gold standard data to customers who have invested significant sums in collecting spatial data. Nor can joined-up decision-making be achieved without sustained interoperability, since many government departments have invested in best of breed vertical market applications built on Autodesk, ESRI, Intergraph and MapInfo and in Europe on these vendor toolsets and those from STAR Informatic and Cadcorp for example. The necessity for integrated and timely decision making means that automated processing is required which means that there must be a set of tools that guarantee spatial data quality and integrity, as well security, reliability. In the financial sector this is termed straight through processing. This sector is critically aware that businesses lose money through data quality problems. A recent estimate by the Data Warehousing Institute attributed losses of more than $600bn each year to data quality problems.

Additionally our spatial data also needs to be stored in an environment that is part of mainstream IT architecture, so that future application developers will be able to develop new solutions secure in the knowledge that they can access this enormous investment in data.

With Oracle at 9i providing mainstream reliability, security and openness Laser-Scan has responded by providing access to standards based, persistent topology creation, storage and maintenance all in native Oracle format. With this level of investment in spatial data at stake and the reliance that government places on this information this is very much a situation that should have a belt and braces (equivalent in Europe of the term suspenders, but the idiom is way different!).

Since writing this Dimitri has posted. So finally some information, the pricing for Radius Topology is freely advertised on our website and has been since its launch. It may be found [here].

In terms of common tasks and performance, some of this work has already been carried out at the University of Delft by Oosterom, Baars et al. The common tasks Dimitri talks about involve both geometrical and topological operations. I am prevented from publishing the work, but I am sure if anyone wishes to contact Peter Oosterom at TU Delft he will be able to respond to requests for comparative evaluations.

Michael Sanderson
CEO
Laser-Scan