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  • 1.  Important Changes to Your StreetPro Delivery

    Employee
    Posted 12-23-2019 10:38
    Edited by Daniel Edwards 12-23-2019 11:35

    There are some important changes coming in 2020 to the StreetPro product family. 

    We are making these short-term changes with the goal of enhancing your user experience with StreetPro products in 2020.  Please email me or software.support@pb.com if you have any questions or concerns regarding these changes.  I'll be happy to set up a call to discuss anything relating to StreetPro products.   

    PLEASE NOTE: THESE CHANGES DO NOT APPLY TO STREETPRO PRODUCTS FOR AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, CHINA & JAPAN.

    Smart Data Platform


    Pitney Bowes Software is investing in a multimillion-dollar production modernization program called the Smart Data Platform to replace the existing processes that build our StreetPro products.  We have undertaken this work over the past year for several reasons:

    • To handle significant changes to the format of some of our source data that necessitate major changes to our production processes
    • To take advantage of the latest processing and big data technologies
    • To integrate production with our software and data marketplace
    • To allow us offer more frequent updates of some countries which are currently only updated annually. This also lays the groundwork for us potentially offering our products in new ways in the future such as via APIs.
    • To allow us to integrate new content and data updates into our StreetPro products much faster so our StreetPro product releases will be more up to date than they are currently, and corrections and real-world changes are implemented faster.

    Enhancing your experience

    There will be some changes to your StreetPro delivery as part of our Smart Data Platform implementation:

    Coverage

    Customers purchasing StreetPro Display, Classic and Navigation Premium products for the United States will receive the following additional territories in their 2020 releases: The Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and the US Virgin Islands.

    FeatureID format change

    One of the most requested changes to our StreetPro products has been for the StreetPro Feature Identifiers (FeatureID, ID) to be unique and consistent between releases. 

    As part of the work on the Smart Data Platform, we will be implementing new FeatureIDs that will increase consistency between releases/vintages.  Currently we supply FeatureIDs as a string of numbers in a character field (16-character field width) or as an integer field depending on the layer in the product. 

    From 2020 we will supply the FeatureIDs formatted as Universally Unique Identifiers.  This is an industry standard format that is a combination of characters and numbers.  As a result of this the FeatureID and ID column will change from 16 character / integer / decimal fields to 36 character fields

    2019 StreetPro Products                                        

    16 Character Field/ Integer/ Decimal                   

    2019 StreetPro FeatureID format

    2020 StreetPro Products
    36 Character Field

    2020 StreetPro FeatureID (Universally Unique Identifier)
    FeatureID transition assistance

    To help customers with the transition of their road networks from the old IDs to the new, we will be providing correspondence files containing the 16 character older IDs and their respective Universally Unique Identifiers for the road network until the end of 2021.  NOTE: the correspondence file will only be available for the road networks layers containing FeatureIDs (this does not include the streets tables from StreetPro Display as they are chained for performance).


    Tabfile improvements

    StreetPro Products have traditionally been delivered in MapInfo Tab format.  The size of the StreetPro datasets and the number of different character sets supported in StreetPro products has increased in many countries beyond the limits of the traditional tab file.  From the version 15.2 release in October 2015 of MapInfo Professional, a new Extended Tab (Native X) format has been available to resolve the limits of the traditional Tab file.  This only works in 64bit editions of the Mapinfo Professional software (release version 15.2 and newer).

    StreetPro products will now be supplied in Extended Tab format where the dataset goes close to or beyond the limits of traditional Tab files (files larger than 2GB / names in Multiple character sets).  Customers still using older 32bit editions or version 12.5 (64bit) of MapInfo Professional will not be able to use the Extended Tab data files.  Any existing StreetPro customers in this situation should contact me or Tech support to discuss how we can help to upgrade your software or work around this issue.

    Multiple formats as standard

    StreetPro products have traditionally been available in alternative formats on request.  From 2020 releases onwards, customers accessing their StreetPro products via the Software and Data Marketplace will be able choose whether to download them in MapInfo Tab, ESRI shape format (where the files are below 2GB in size) and ESRI filegeodatabase or Extended Tab where they exceed 2GB.  For database users the data will be available in Pipe Delimited Text format with WKT (Well Known Text) geometries. 

     

    SDM allows StreetPro users to download their StreetPro products in multiple formats

     

    StreetPro Global Installer

    With the rollout of the Software and Data Marketplace, our customers have the flexibility to download their Streetpro products as and when they need them and to automate their downloads using our SDK.  Following consultation with our customers, we will no longer be providing our StreetPro products with an installer.  The data will be supplied as a Standard zipfile from now on.

    For customers using StreetPro products with Spectrum Spatial, the named resources files will continue be supplied in the zipfile.  Guidance will be supplied in the documentation on how to change the file paths to point to the data and our tech support team is available to assist with the transition software.support@pb.com

    US customers will still receive the Autoloader utility bundled with their products.

     

    Significant Increase in USA Landmarks (StreetPro Display, Classic and Navigation Premium)

    The new source data provides a significant increase in the number of Landmarks available in StreetPro Display, Classic and Navigation Premium USA.  The USA landmarks count will increase by over 400% as a consequence of this change.


    New restrictions in StreetPro Navigation Premium's restrictions table

    As part of the enhancement of the StreetPro products, a new restriction type:

    UT: Prohibited U-Turn Manoeuvre has been included in the Restrictions table of StreetPro Navigation Premium products

    Example of new Prohibited U turn Manoeuvre records

     

    Improved Signposted Speeds in StreetPro Navigation Premium: Navigation Streets Table

    Modelling improvements have been implemented to better assign speed limits to parts of the network where verified signposted speed information is not available.

    StreetPro Navigation Premium: Navigation Streets table – Pedestrian-Related Roads

    To improve the ease of including or removing pedestrian-related roads, the Road Classification Value "Z" in the Navigation Streets table will only represent Pedestrian related roads.  These include Walkways, Stairs, Pedestrian Areas and Enclosed Traffic Area Galleries (Covered Shopping Street or Passage).  Any types of road currently classified as Z for vehicular usage have been moved to other classification codes.

    StreetPro Navigation Premium Nodes Table 

    The Valence field in the nodes table now includes improved Z-Level values and the quality has been improved around borders.


    I'm excited by these changes to the way we build our StreetPro products, the new sources of data we can access and the new ways we can deliver our products.  Let us know how you think these changes will improve your experience with StreetPro products.  

    Got ideas for further enhancements we can make to StreetPro products?  Post your comments to this thread or submit your ideas here: https://ideas.pitneybowes.com/



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    Daniel Edwards
    Product Manager, Global StreetPro Product Manager
    Pitney Bowes Software and Data
    READING
    UK
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  • 2.  RE: Important Changes to Your StreetPro Delivery

    Posted 12-23-2019 15:41

    Your 1st 2 improvements, Dan, are good examples of increasing the interoperability of data products. Interoperability allows data users to bring together data products in unique and powerful ways.  By adding the missing territories to StreetPro's coverage, now StreetPro can work together with other data products and Geocoding more completely (for instance with Postal and Admin Products).  Additionally, by improving StreetPro Feature Identifiers (FeatureID, ID) to be unique and consistent between releases, now StreetPro data can be reliably joined to by other datasets.  These are good steps forward for StreetPro!



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    Tom Gilligan
    Pitney Bowes Software, Inc.
    White River Junction, VT, USA
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  • 3.  RE: Important Changes to Your StreetPro Delivery

    Employee
    Posted 01-02-2020 18:19
    Exciting changes Dan. I look forward to what this means in terms of increased global coverage, product consistency and update frequency. I was already seeing elements of this across the Asian region in 2019, I look forward to what the Smart Data Platform enables in 2020.

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    Gerry Stanley
    Pitney Bowes Australia Pty Ltd
    Macquarie Park
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