Organisations will now be able to enrich business applications with geographic data from geographic information systems (GIS), such as Esri ArcGIS, with a new solution from SAP.
The SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA, enables developers to use application programming interfaces (APIs) published by GIS systems to fetch geospatial data. Business data enriched with geometric attributes can be published as a service, so that GIS users can access SAP business data from within their GIS tools.
The framework will also embed a responsive map user interface in a business application to display both business and spatial data simultaneously. By storing the geometry of any SAP business object in the SAP HANA platform, spatial data processing will be accelerated in memory for real-time.
“In many asset-intensive industries such as energy, transportation and public sector, the ability to visualise business objects on maps is critical to improving efficiency and decision making,” said Irfan Khan, GM and global head, database and data management, SAP. “SAP Geographical Enablement Framework, powered by SAP HANA, can help organisations streamline the processing of both enterprise and spatial data for greater location awareness across business processes.”
The announcement was made at the Esri User Conference held this week in San Diego.
According to SAP and Esri, their continued collaborations enables organisations to gain contextual insights from their data, with business and GIS users able to work within the same access and editing environment.
SAP HANA is an open platform, and certified with the Open Geospatial Consortium, allowing organisations to use spatial data from third-party spatial solutions that also adhere to the standard. It supports synchronous and asynchronous imports of data from any spatial reference system (SRS) or coordinate reference system (CRS).
