GIS MAPPING
Malaysian Adventure in GIS
Technology counts, but people make the difference
By Ruth Carapella

The crux of today's telecommunications projects is conquering geography. Or, as Daniel Moreno, GIS coordinator for the Southwest Region of Denver-based CH2M Hill explains, telecommunications companies who are expanding into new markets need to solve geographic optimization problems. They need to identify how to reach the greatest number of customers with the lowest investment cost.
    Moreno has first-hand experience in applying GIS to identify optimum telecommunications networks. CH2M Hill performs marketing studies, business studies, and strategic planning for telecommunications companies. Additionally, CH2M Hill designs, engineers, and installs fiber optic networks. With Moreno's GIS support, the company has provided these services to clients in the United States, Spain, France, Poland, and Malaysia.
    The company's involvement in the telecommunications arena began 3 years ago when Moreno was approached by a client who wanted to plan and install a fiber optic system in Malaysia. They wanted to identify the optimum system configuration for a hybrid fiber optics cable (HFC) system.

The Quest for Digital Data
The team headed to Malaysia with notions of how the project would be developed. However, those notions didn't always pan out.
    Moreno said, "The first trip to Malaysia was a kick. We didn't have a clue what we were going to be getting into. We didn't know what information existed and we didn't know if we were going to be locked up for looking for information. We just didn't know what to expect."
    What they found frustrated and intrigued the GIS team. They quickly learned that good digital data was being used within the country; however, it was tantalizingly out-of-reach. The first clue that good data was available came from a Shell road map picked up at a 7-Eleven market in the city of Johor Baharu.
    Johor Baharu lies just north of Singapore on the southern tip of Malaysia's western peninsula. The city provides a home to some of the largest technology firms in the world and has undergone rapid development in the last few years. Even so, the Shell map was surprisingly accurate: it showed all of the new developments. Moreno thought that the map company might have a digital file.
    The name of the company who produced the map, located in tiny print on a map corner, provided few clues. Moreno began a search for the company, but gave up after literally traveling down several dead ends.
    He said, "I got the address and I hired a taxi. Addresses in Malaysia do not follow a western paradigm. You'll be going down a street with row houses and the numbers will jump from 52 to 78 to 3. We tried." Eventually, after some local inquiries, Moreno became convinced that the company had gone out of business.
    Moreno's initial search for digital data brought home the fact that the team had to cultivate relationships with locals who knew the lay of the land. To succeed, the team needed to hire local people who knew local agencies and had local contacts.
    So, the team's next effort took them to ESRI's Kuala Lumpur offices and the two major universities in Malaysia. These efforts proved far more fruitful from a people-perspective.
    The ESRI representative gave Moreno leads in the public and private sectors of the GIS industry. He drove Moreno to places where maps were available.
    The universities proved invaluable. Both University Science Malaysia (USM) in Penang and University Technology Malaysia (UTM) in Johor Baharu have GIS departments. They train students in ERSI's ARC/INFO . Professors at the universities recommended their best students to the CH2M Hill team. Additionally, they provided contacts. They greased the skids for acquiring data, obtaining hard copy maps, and locating other data that the team could not have obtained on their own.
    Even so, Moreno found that very little digital data was available. Obtaining aerial photographs was not possible. Some of the maps they were given had areas blacked-out. Although Spot images were available, they didn't have the resolution the analysis required. Moreno needed a different approach.

Information is Power
The first step in telecommunications analysis is to determine where you want to go-which market to enter. This fundamental planning stage starts with an overall country base map augmented with demographic information such as income, numbers of businesses, and population density.
    Moreno obtained tabular hardcopy information about demographics and boundaries from the Malaysian equivalent of the U.S. Census Bureau. His team gathered data from available maps. The company bought some high level data from a local data vendor. Although this data met the requirements of the fundamental planning phase, it was not sufficient for subsequent analysis.
    Telecommunications projects like the Malaysian project follow a four-step process. After fundamental planning, a geographic analysis identifies areas to be developed first. Next, market opportunity maps and a conceptual design are generated. Finally, the project enters the most data-intensive phase: engineering design. To complete this portion of the project, the team needed a digital base map with property boundaries, street locations, and building footprints.
    They needed data. Through his newly found contacts, Moreno learned of the Penang GIS department (PGIS). Moreno said, "I personally visited them and saw some very, very good ARC/INFO land base maps on their wall. I tried to purchase data from them, but they would not give it up."
    In Malaysia, information is power. Those with information are very reluctant to share their data. PGIS agreed to sell hard copy maps to the CH2M Hill team even though they knew the team could, and would, duplicate as much of the information as possible by digitizing the maps. In Malaysia, Moreno learned, the same data is digitized many times.
    Armed with PGIS maps, out-of-date cadastral maps at a 1:12,500 scale obtained from the Malaysian equivalent of the USGS, and the tabular hardcopy census information from the initial phase of the analysis, the team began work. The team scanned and digitized close to a thousand maps to develop their land base.
    They tried to achieve an accuracy of 1" = 500'. But, because they were starting with dated hardcopy blueline maps, it was hard to even know how accurate the maps were. No aerial photographs were available to verify the maps. So, the team looked for additional data to augment the cadastral mapping. They discovered a critical source: developer's maps.
    Developers in Malaysia are required to register plat maps. Often, these maps are created with AutoCAD. Moreno bargained with developers to obtain their CAD files. Moreno was able to leverage negotiations by pointing out that CH2M Hill's clients would eventually provide cable, Internet access, on-demand video, phone, and all the other services associated with an HFC system if they could complete their plan. This in turn would increase the value of the new developments. He was successful. Project maps were updated with the latest information via CAD files.
    Even with this additional data, all of the maps created needed to be ground verified. Field crews, with walk-out maps in hand, traversed the land base.
    Looking ahead, the team built more intelligence into the system than was absolutely needed for design. While crews were in the field, they took notes on everything. They estimated income levels, described buildings, and noted demographic features with an eye toward supporting their client's efforts to market and sell HFC services, and to operate and maintain an HFC system.
    They gathered enough data to turn the tables. No longer was CH2M Hill in the position of seeking data from others. Instead, the GIS team was approached by local companies who wanted to purchase data.

Technical Bugs
The transition from being data-poor to data-rich was not always smooth sailing. It took Moreno weeks to understand the organization or scheme of the cadastral surveys and to implement a data structure that matched this scheme.
    In Malaysia, the cadastral system is a holdover from British Colonial days. Cadastral maps use a Cassini projection system with units in chains (a chain equals 66 feet). The federal coordinate system uses a Rectified Skew Orthomorphic (RSO) projection. All of the data from the cadastral maps, as well as the data from developers and other sources, had to be converted into RSO.
    Moreno said, "Just discovering that Malaysia used an RSO coordinate system was enlightening for me. 'Oh', I realized, that's what we have to use. That's how we have to organize our data. Fortunately, ESRI has an RSO conversion system."
    The data organization scheme needed to reflect the way the data base was developed, organized, and displayed because the project was completed on a micro-station-based platform. The team took their ARC/INFO land base, cut it into pieces, and exported it into micro-station format. Using their design software, they created walk-out maps. These maps were ground verified and corrected. The final corrected map layers matched the initial data scheme organization and thus paved the way for future data acquisition.
    With an eye to the future, the team tackled the challenge of setting up one of the first ARC/INFO NT workstations in southeast Asia. Moreno chose to set up an NT LAN in Malaysia because the company wanted to maintain the Malaysian GIS center as a long-term installation.
    Moreno said, "We started with the beta version of ARC/INFO NT, which was not supported. We knew the direction we wanted to go; we tried to look ahead."
    They encountered a few bugs and nuances (or features in software parlance). But Moreno does not regret the decision to move forward with the NT system.

Technology Doesn't Hold All Answers
In his opinion, the differences between NT and UNIX-based ARC/INFO are small, yet the advantages within CH2M Hill are tremendous. The company's IT support focuses on NT and Windows products. He believes that by using the same platform as everyone else, GIS departments in Colorado and Malaysia get the best internal support.
    CH2M Hill's Penang office supports other company projects that require data conversion. Maps are scanned, placed on the company's FTP server, and pulled off in Penang. There, the GIS center handles heads-up digitizing, cleanup and attribution. Then, the Penang center places the polished ARC/INFO files back on the server. These files are then downloaded by CH2M Hill's other GIS centers.
    Technology underscores the Malaysian operation. But according to Moreno, the lesson he learned from the Malaysian project doesn't have to do with technology, it has to do with people. In the final analysis, the importance of technology falls behind the importance of people and relationships.
    He said, "We could have pulled this project off without all of our wiz-bang technology. We could not have pulled it off without contacts, relationships and local knowledge. That was an eye-opener for us."
    Moreno's efforts to build relationships in Malaysia have paid off. The Penang GIS office produces high quality work and gives the company a competitive advantage in the GIS marketplace.

About the Author:
Ruth Carapella, principal of Pen Craft Copywriting & Graphic Design, writes about and for natural resource companies. She may be reached at 800- 689-9235 or e-mail [email protected].

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