Developing Geographic Data

Many ARCHIBUS applications use the geographic hierarchy to record information about the location of physical properties or companies and organizations with which you do business.

ARCHIBUS provides tables for the following elements of a geographic hierarchy:

Geographic Business Regions
Countries
Regions

States
Counties

Cities

Sites

The geographic tables are hierarchical; that is, the higher level tables validate against fields in the lower level tables. Therefore, you will want to develop these tables in the order in which they are listed above so that the values are available to choose when completing tables lower in the hierarchy.

The purpose of the fields of the tables will be evident to you. The following are some important notes:

Table	Purpose
Geographic Business Regions	For organizations doing business globally, geographic regions group your countries into the geographic regions you define. On global dashboards that include a map view, such as the Real Estate Portfolio Management's Global Portfolio Dashboard, you first select a geographic region, and can then select a country, and site to zoom the map to that location.
Countries Table	If you plan on developing regions, you must develop the owning countries.
Regions Table	Regions represent geographic areas of countries and are identified by Country Code + Region Code, such as CANADA-NORTHEAST and FRANCE-NORTHEAST.
States Table	The States table holds a country’s legal divisions, such as Canadian provinces or U.S. states. State Code is the identifying field and must be completed.
Counties Table	Counties are identified by the combination of State Code + County Code, such as NJ-MIDDLESEX and MA-MIDDLESEX.
Cities Table	Cities are identified by State Code + City Code, such as OR-PORTLAND and ME-PORTLAND.
Sites Table	Sites (or campuses) can hold multiple buildings. for example, an Executive Office Park site on which three office buildings are located. Note that for the Number of Buildings field, you must enter the number of buildings located on the site; the system does not calculate this value.

Using the Define Geographic Data Tasks

The Define Geographic Locations tasks use drill-down selection lists to present the levels of the hierarchy. For information on working with this, see Using Drill-Down Selection Lists.

With these tasks, you can enter new data or edit existing data. When editing existing data, you can use the filter console, located at the top of the view, to limit the display of the locations to only those containing the value you enter in the filter console. For information on the filter console, see Using Filter Consoles

Developing Geographic Locations for the Real Estate Portfolio Management Domain

There are some special considerations when developing geographic data for use in the Real Estate Portfolio Management domain. When developing data to be used in this domain, be aware of the following:

To see portfolio items listed by country in the selection list in the Manage Buildings/Structures/Land by Location task, you must enter the Country, State, and City Codes for the portfolio item.
To have portfolio items appear in all key performance indicator charts grouped by geographic location, you should develop the entire geographic hierarchy. That is, you should enter the Country, Region, State, City, and Site Codes
If you do not want to track your portfolio items for all geographic levels, you can develop your data up to the level that interests you. For example, to track your portfolio to the city level, maintain data from the city down, that is city, site and building. However, if you miss a level, such as site, the application is not able to roll up your building data to the city level.
The City and State Codes are used together with the street address (Address 1 field) to calculate the latitude and longitude so that the portfolio item can be placed on the map. Enter full words rather than abbreviations for the address. For example, enter "Street", not "St."

Geographic Locations and Map Views

Geocoding: Several applications include views that show your data on geospatially-enabled maps. To place locations on a map, the application uses the building's street address (Address 1 field) together with the City and State Codes to calculate the latitude and longitude for the location, so this information is required to place the building on the map.

The application calculates the longitude and latitude when a geocode action is run. The Real Estate Portfolio Management domain includes a geocode button on the Manage Buildings/Structure/Land by Locations maps. For other applications, the Technology Process includes examples of views that demonstrate geocoding. Your Add-In Manager can develop views for geocoding. For example, see Technologies / User Interface Addi-Ins / Geographic Information System (GIS) Address Geocoder.

Drill-down selection lists: Map views include a drill-down selection list that you use to select the location for which you want to see your data. The geographic levels are Country, Region, State, City, Site, and Building. For the building to be shown on the map, the address for the building must include the street address, city and state. Some maps also require you to develop sites that you associate with buildings so that building will show up in the list.