Smallworld was a GIS

Geographic Information System

A geographic information system, geographical information science, or geospatial information studies is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data...

 company founded in Cambridge, England, in 1989 by Dick Newell

Dick Newell

Dr. Richard G. Newell has spent over 30 years in the software industry in Computer aided design and Geographic Information Systems .Dick holds degrees in Civil Engineering and Numerical Analysis and a PhD in Chemical Engineering....

 and others. It grew to become the global market leader for GIS in utilities and communications, according to Daratech. In September 2000, it was acquired by GE Energy, a division of General Electric

General Electric

General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...

. While the company name has gone, the Smallworld name lives on as the brand name for the software technology and applications.

Smallworld technology supports application products for Telecommunications, utility and public systems organizations.

Smallworld Product Suite

The Smallworld Product Suite Offerings mostly include AM/FM/GIS

AM/FM/GIS

AM/FM/GIS stands for Automated Mapping/Facilities Management and is a subset of GIS, which is associated with public utilities like gas, electric, water and telecommunications. The term AM/FM/GIS mostly refers to GIS software that allows utility users to digitize, manage and analyze their utility...

 software for outage management (PowerOn), Smallworld Design Manager for engineering design, Smallworld Physical and Logical Network Inventories for telecommunications and Smallworld Spatial Intelligence for business analysis.

Recent developments include advanced functionality for automation of design activities; in particular modelling and tracking the entire design, which is constructed as built process.

Technology

GE Energy's Smallworld GIS platform is based on two technologies:

1. an object-oriented
   Object-oriented programming
   Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm using "objects" – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs. Programming techniques may include features such as data abstraction,...
   
    programming language called Magik that supports multiple inheritance
   Multiple inheritance
   Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which a class can inherit behaviors and features from more than one superclass....
   
   , polymorphisim
   Type polymorphism
   In computer science, polymorphism is a programming language feature that allows values of different data types to be handled using a uniform interface. The concept of parametric polymorphism applies to both data types and functions...
   
    and is dynamically typed.
2. database
   Database
   A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
   
    technology called Version Managed Data Store
   VMDS
   VMDS abbreviates the relational database technology called Version Managed Data Store provided by GE Energy as part of its Smallworld technology platform and was designed from the outset to store and analyse the highly complex spatial and topological networks typically used by enterprise utilities...
   
    (VMDS) that has been designed and optimized for storing and analyzing complex spatial and topological data. The native Smallworld datastore can be stored in an Oracle Database
   Oracle Database
   The Oracle Database is an object-relational database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation....
   
   . This allows the use of Oracle facilities for backup
   Backup
   In information technology, a backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup....
   
   s and recovery
   Data loss
   Data loss is an error condition in information systems in which information is destroyed by failures or neglect in storage, transmission, or processing. Information systems implement backup and disaster recovery equipment and processes to prevent data loss or restore lost data.Data loss is...
   
   .