All ProStar products run on the ProStar Stack. Each of the products in the ProStar Stack occupies one or more layers in this environment as shown. The ProStar Stack houses three products that contain content specific to utility asset management and damage prevention practices and are built on a scalable geospatial database supported on a Cloud infrastructure. ProStar products include Transparent Earth™, PointMan™, and EarthWorm™. All ProStar products are open source, GPS-centric and they are designed to run across all the layers in the ProStar Stack.
The application layer is the technical foundation of ProStar's solutions. This layer contains the geospatial database, the source code and ProStar's patented processes developed to create, read, update and delete the application data. The application layer is a secure, reliable, robust, and scalable 'backend' platform created to develop, deploy, and run geospatial applications on the portal. The application layer has a sophisticated development workbench that is used to develop programming interfaces and services to streamline the development of subsurface utility mapping applications. ProStar Products combine patented business rules and functions that are offered as software as a service 'SaaS' through a licensing agreement. A description of ProStar products is provided below.
Transparent Earth™ - The ProStar Portal
Transparent Earth™ is the ProStar portal application designed to provide the field utility worker with the visualization, situation awareness and precise location data required to enable better decisions to be made and complete field tasks with greater efficiency. The real-time functionality provided by Transparent Earth allows workers to view all the available data relative to their location including above or below ground assets, as-built information, photos and any documents related to a point, line or bounded area. Transparent Earth is configured to use precise GPS-centric data and ProStar's precision integration processes to provide a view of the location of field workers relative to the location of buried and surface assets from a browser. The real-time integration and visualization functions of Transparent Earth provide unprecedented situational awareness to all stakeholders involved in a project, both on the project site as well as from the office. With Transparent Earth mission critical information is at the fingertips of project personnel allowing them to make decisions with a higher degree of confidence thereby increasing productivity and potentially reducing the risk of damage to buried assets during construction activities.
PointMan™ - A Precise Point
PointMan is a GPS-centric mobile software application that enables authorized field personnel to capture a precise point of asset locations and other location related information from a data locate tool or compliant mobile device. PointMan is designed to collect GPS location points including the precision of the point and the pedigree in the 'metadata' associated to the point being captured. PointMan captures, binds and submits the precision and pedigree of the data to ProStar's geospatial database in real time. The PointMan application enhanced by Google provides the field worker with the ability to visualize their proximity relative to existing infrastructure, view any existing data relating to that infrastructure and provide the ability to edit historical location data, update design drawings, capture GPS tagged photos and even make notes or sketches before submitting the information to the ProStar application database.
EarthWorm™ - Click To Dig
EarthWorm™ is ProStar's integration application for the capture, storage, logging, management, aggregation and routing of data. EarthWorm receives asset location data represented as precision points, lines and polygons and any associated metadata from compliant data collection devices running PointMan. What lies beneath the earth's surface is the earthworm's domain and ProStar's EarthWorm is where the business rules for precision integration, aggregation, security, user administration, connectivity, routing, queuing, messaging, data transformation, application integration, reporting and other business functions are managed so that the user is presented with a complete picture of what lies below the surface. EarthWorm essentially provides the functions necessary to integrate utility infrastructure information in a manner that provides the precision, pedigree, alignment and tolerance to create a single conflated view so that business decisions can be made based on the information being presented and visualized. EarthWorm's business rules and precision processes ensure that client requirements and regulatory requirements are met and that the needs of the subsurface utility engineering disciplines and the damage prevention community are supported.
