Within a Site, the topmost mechanism for organizing data is the Area. An Area represents some region of space in the real world, such as a floor in a building or the outside plant of a campus.
NOTE: an Area in new IRM roughly corresponds to a Site Workspace in IRM Windows Desktop.
Every Area can be displayed on a Canvas (sometimes referenced as the Design World) to display graphical information such as its associated drawing representation.
The defined Area is also assigned a coordinate system, which may or may not be the same coordinate system used by other Areas.
For example, it would normally make sense for all floors on a building to share a single coordinate system, as the orientation, scale, and positioning of all the building’s floor plans would normally be comparable to each other. However, floors from a different building may very well use a different coordinate system, as that building may be oriented differently.
NOTE: that IRM does not impose any of these restrictions, but structuring the data properly is important to successfully use IRM.
The Coordinate system assigned to an Area can be one of either:
A geo-spatial (or geo-locked, if you prefer) coordinate system is one that has a “datum” (or reference point) set with x, y and latitude, longitude, values that correspond to each other, and a rotation angle.
If an Area uses a geo-enabled coordinate system, IRM can identify to the user the latitude and longitude of any position within the area.
If two Areas use the same coordinate system (either geo-enabled or not), it is possible to display them within a single drawing window (called a Canvas) in IRM. This can be useful, for example, for breaking out part of a floor plan into a separate Areas for security purposes (not letting most IRM users see what’s in the top-secret server room), or breaking an outside plant siteplan down into separate Areas because that’s how it’s handled in other software.
Some, though not all, types of objects that IRM supports can be drawn in the Design World. There are two fundamental varieties of objects that can be drawn in the Design World:
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Managed Objects (see the following section) such as equipment, cables, pathways, and maintenance holes -- IRM carries detailed data for these objects. These objects are commonly imported into IRM via spreadsheets (Dynamic Data Reconciliation or DDR Import) or automated discovery mechanisms (Discovery Correlation Engine or DCE).
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Decorative Drawing Objects such as lines, arcs, text objects, and block shapes -- IRM carries mostly just graphical information for these objects. These objects are commonly imported into IRM from CAD drawings.
