GIS Practicum - OGC Certification for FME

This two month practicum term is open to students currently enrolled in the BCIT GIS Program.

Location: Remote / Hybrid option in the Vancouver Lower Mainland
Wage: $23.50 pr/hr CAD
Duration: Block Mode | April 21, 2025 - June 20, 2025 |

Application Instructions:

• Please upload your applications in PDF format only
• Required: Resume, Cover Letter
• Submit your application on or before October 2nd, 2024
  Applications will be reviewed on a continuous basis as they are received, and interviews will be scheduled promptly during the week of September 30th/October 7th. So, we encourage you to apply as soon as possible.
  This posting will remain open until the role has been filled

About Safe Software

Safe Software is the creator and developer of FME — the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data worldwide. Over 10,000 organizations around the world use FME in industries like AEC, government, utilities, and transportation to maximize the value of their data.

Founded in 1993, Safe is headquartered in Surrey, BC with over 200 team members and counting. We’re always looking for talented individuals with diverse backgrounds who are determined to learn and grow. Are you ready to join the team?

Practicum Objective

Open standards are essential to support both sharing data as well as integration and automation across complex systems. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is the leading global agency responsible for managing open geospatial standards such as GML, KML, CityGML and many others. Safe Software’s FME supports more than 30 OGC standards. At the moment, FME is currently certified on only 4 of these standards: OGC GML, KML, Geopackage, and GeoTIFF. Also our certification status is 4 years old.

The overall goal of this practicum is to validate and certify FME with some of the most used standards. Specifically, in this project the objective is to update our OGC compliance to FME2025, and to add certifications for a number of other popular standards such as CityGML, WFS etc. These standards typically are important to both government agencies and private enterprises who depend on common protocols and data models for implementations across a wide range of domains and locations. In terms of application areas, these often include domains where agencies need to assemble data across a wide range of subject areas such as environmental management and disaster response, as well as areas as diverse as BIM and indoor mapping to climate change. This project’s outcome will have a lasting impact for FME and its user community.

As time permits, we may wish to investigate the possibilities of certifying FME with BuildingSmart for IFC and ISO for metadata.

Practicum Deliverables

At Safe Software, we love when information is made more accessible and this practicum is no different. We want you to share what you’ve learned with both our team and our customers. In this practicum, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Operate a state of the art testing environment called TEAM hosted by the OGC.
• Build test models in FME.
• Consume and generate data according to OGC standards such as GML, KML, WFS etc.
• Validate output datasets against relevant standards such as schema, content & business rules.
• Diagnose problems and reconfigure FME to generate compliant output.
• Generate and submit compliance reports in order to support certification.
• Create a Knowledge Base page summarizing the project to provide information to users about how FME is certified and what standards FME complies with.
• Deliver presentations to the Safe Software staff of your research, recommendations & outcomes.
• Published a blog article describing your practicum experience.

Learning Outcomes

This practicum will build your skills as a GIS professional as you will gain a deeper understanding of day-to-day efforts and challenges within local governments. Upon completion of this practicum, you will:

• Learn how to build data transformation and generation models in FME.
• Learn how to use state of the art testing, validation and diagnostic tools.
• Gain familiarity with open standards, XML, GML, JSON.
• Learn about a range of web services and messaging protocols such as OGC WFS, Open API, REST, HTTP GET, POST, etc.
• Develop communication and teamwork skills as you work directly with our team, customers, and partners.
• Improve your ability to write and present technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Qualifications and Skills

Our team is open to collaborating with individuals with all levels of experience in GIS and software. Some skills that will be beneficial to this practicum may include:

• Familiarity with any structured text data such as XML, GML, JSON is an asset
• Knowledge or experience working with open standards
• Any knowledge or experience with FME or GIS will be helpful
• Strong communication skills, particularly with reading and writing technical documentation
• Detail oriented. Validation and certification work requires focussed attention to detail and the persistence to follow through diagnostic error logs and trace back to find the sources of any errors.
• Ability to work independently on projects and ask for help when needed

Practicum Overview

Week 1-2

• Onboarding and meeting your new team.
• FME Platform Training:
  • FME Accelerator
  • FME Academy (FME Form Basic, FME Form Advanced, and optional FME Flow Authoring)

Week 3-4

• Understand and review OGC and Open-Standards related Knowledge Base Articles
• Watch and understand most recently released webinars on related topics
• Understand key issues related to styling, attribute management, and format attributes.
• Update relevant articles with new workspaces and screenshots
• Learn about the OGC certification process and work with the team to plan related work

Week 4-6

• Review FME standards/formats to prioritize for certification
• Being creating an end-to-end certification workflow for one standard

Week 6-8

• Iterate as appropriate through tasks
• Create a related article and video tutorial in the Knowledge Base

Week 8

• Wrap up practicum, deliver a Show and Tell presentation to the Customer Success team summarizing the resources you have created

Additional Links

• Read about Sienna's practicum experience at Safe Software
• Read about Evie’s practicum experience at Safe Software
• Explore Safe’s culture of fun in our Instagram highlight reels (Takeover Tuesdays, #LifeAtSafe)
• Importance of Open Standards
• Achieving OGC Compliance (from 2021 practicum)
• OGC Standards
• FME Certifications on OGC’s compliance page