Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gis
Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1992 19:43:16 GMT
From:         Peter Batty <Peter.Batty@SMALLWORLD.CO.UK>
Subject:      Information about Smallworld

Hello everyone,
  I have had requests from lots of people for information about Smallworld,
so here is a brief overview (now I've found out how to get at GIS-L!).

  Smallworld is a UK-based company which produces a product called
Smallworld GIS.  We started in 1988 and first launched the product in 1990,
though it was 1991 before we really started shipping it to customers.
Since then we have grown to a customer base of about 70 sites in Europe,
mainly in the UK and Germany.  We have primarily aimed at the utility
sector, but we have quite a number of customers in Local Government
(Municipalities) and other areas. We also have distributors in the
Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France and Spain, and we are
planning to set up in the US and Australia in the near future. This year
the company has grown from about 24 to 60 people in the UK, about 90
worldwide. Our largest order is from the City of Munich in Germany, who
have a 166 seat system.

  Some technical information on the system ... we started out by doing a
survey of the GIS marketplace and found (not surprisingly) that by far the
largest inhibitors to GIS implementation were the cost of data conversion
and customisation, therefore these were two key areas we focussed on.
  The customisation issue we have addressed by developing the whole system
in an object-oriented language.  We wrote our own language called
Smallworld Magik for this, because we felt that all the commercially
available languages had shortcomings for what we wanted to do.  This is
closer to Smalltalk than C++ in flavour.  We fully support multiple
inheritance, polymorphism, dependencies etc.  The vast majority of the
GIS code which we supply is written in Magik, and the customer can extend
and customise the system in Magik.  While I don't want this to be too much
of a sales pitch, we feel that we have by far the most easily customised
GIS on the market. I think this is borne out by the success we have had in
the past year or so.
  The data capture issue we addressed by integrating a lot of data capture
functions such as line following and fitting within the product, and
supporting a high degree of raster/vector integration.  We capture
topology interactively and it is easy to specify rules for this.  The
database is completely continuous with no partitions, so we don't have
to worry about edge matching, which is often a significant cost in
data capture.
  Another area where we feel we have some unique function is in handling
concurrency in a long transaction environment.  We use a system of version
management which provides a much more elegant solution than checkout,
which is the main alternative approach which people have used. Version
management is a fundamental part of our database system, which also has
spatial indexing built in at a deep level to give us good performance.
We store all aspects of the data (including rasters) in a single version
managed database.  However, we have a concept called the virtual database
which allows us to integrate commercial databases such as Oracle and Ingres
in a seamless fashion.
  Those are some of the more interesting technical aspects of the product.
Oh, I suppose I should add that we run on various UNIX workstations -
currently Sun, IBM and Digital, and we're just finishing porting to HP.
Both applications and database are binary compatible across all these
platforms, so any combination of machines can be used in a heterogeneous
network.

  We have also produced the following technical papers, which I have in
hard copy form only.  If you would like copies of any of these, please
let me know which ones you would like and send me your postal address.
The papers are:

  1. Ten Difficult Problems in Building a GIS.
  2. An Overview of Geographical Information Systems - the technology and
     its users.
  3. An Open System Architecture for a workstation based GIS.
  4. Version Management - the problem of the long transaction.
  5. The difference between CAD and GIS.
  6. Temporal GIS - modelling the evolution of spatial data in time.
  7. An object-oriented GIS - issues and solutions.
  8. Version management in GIS - applications and techniques.
  9. An overview of Magik.
 10. Who cares about object-orientation?
 11. Geographic Information Systems in Europe.
 12. Management of Time and Space in GIS.
 13. Improving the GIS data capture situation: an integrated approach.
 14. The management of multiple users of large seamless databases.
 15. Integration of spatial objects in a GIS.

If people would like more details on any of the things I've mentioned, please
let me know - via GIS-L if it's something of general interest.

Regards,
  Peter.

=======================================================================
* Peter Batty
* Smallworld Systems, Burleigh House, 13-15 Newmarket Road
* Cambridge CB5 8EG, England
* Tel +44-223-460199, Fax +44-223-460210
* Email Peter.Batty@Smallworld.co.uk
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Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gis