Between the Poles

North American BIM adoption reached 71% in 2012

Over the past five years the processes and technologies of building information modeling (BIM) have been transforming the construction industry.  First architects and to a lesser extent engineers, and now increasingly contractors are adopting BIM to reduce risk and increase margins.  There are signs that owners are also realizing benefits from BIM and that operations and maintenance which are responsible for about 80% of a building's lifetime cost may be the part of the lifecycle of a building where BIM provides the largest benefits.  Typical applications where BIM has been applied include automating clash detection, quantity takeoff. and change propagation; reducing data redundancy; improving collaboration among design teams; construction scheduling; automating bill of materials and job costing; and using 3D visualization to  involve non-technical stakeholders in the design process.

BIM and Geospatial

Several years ago, in an award winning paper at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial -- or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  Kemp wasn’t the first one to speak on this. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.

BIM in the construction industry

McGraw-Hill Construction has conducted a survey of the use of BIM processes and technologies in the construction industry in 2007, 2009 and 2012.  The most recent report called "The Business Value of BIM in North America: 2012" involved an online survey that was completed by 582 respondents from North America in August to September, 2012.  The companies invited to participate came from McGraw-Hill Construction's own databases as well as from industry associations including AGC, AIA, ASA, ASCE, CMAA, COAA, DBIA, NIBS, SMACNA & SMPS.

Workng Definition of BIM

In the survey the working defintion of “BIM” that was "broadly the creation and use of digital models and related collaborative processes between companies to leverage the value of the models."  The definition was intended to differentiate BIM from CAD.  It also was intended to be inclusive, to include users not just model authors.  Respondents were classified as BIM users or non-users.  By non-users was meant "not engaging with BIM at all”.   BIM users included a broad range of users including model authors and users who used models for analysis or simulation, but did not author them.

Repondents' companies were classified into five categories, architects (building and interior), engineers (structural, mechanical, and others), contractors (general and trade), owners, and others. Of the 582 respondents, the company breakdown was

• 7 % owners
• 39% contractors - broad array of contractors
• 21% engineers - mostly structural and mechanical
• 33% architects - mostly building architects

Key trends in BIM in the construction industry

Adoption

Overall Adoption of BIM has increased from 17% in 2007 to 71% in 2012, representing 45% growth over the last 3 years.  In 2012 adoption by all categories of company increased, but contractors in particular saw increased adoption (74%) exceeding that of  architects (70%).

Expertise level and experience

The percentage of very heavy users increased from 27% in 2009 to 39% in 2012, and is projected to increase to 58% by 2014.  The percentage of very heavy users is forecasted to double over the next 5 years.  The percentage of highly experienced users (5 or more years) more than doubled from 2009 to 2012.

Perceived Return on investment (ROI)

Most repondents reported a positive return on investment in BIM with owners, contractors and archtects reporting the highest proportion of positive ROI. 

• Owners 67%
• Contractors 74%
• Engineers 37%
• Architects 65%

A significant proportion of contractors (7%) and architects (8%) report an ROI of over 100%.

Internal benefits of BIM

The most important internal benefits of adopting BIM reported by the respondents were

• Reduced errors and omissions in documents
• Marketing new business to new clients
• Maintaining repeat business with past clients
• Reducing rework
• Offering new services
• Reducing cycle time of specific workflows
• Reducing overall project duration
• Increased profits
• Reduced construction cost
• Fewer claims/litigation
• Recruting and retention of staff

In 2012 the largest increases over 2009 were Increased profits, maintaining clients, reducing project duration and fewer claims.

BIM for operations and maintenance

A small but significant percentage of owners are using models for building system operation analysis, maintenance scheduling, asset and space management.

Related to this, about 60% of contractors report medium to high demand from owners for as-built record models.

Using GPUs for compute-intensive geospatial applications

The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was names the fastest computer on Earth in November 2012, according to the Top500 list.  Most of Titan’s computing capacity comes from its NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators. Based on the same architecture used in NVIDIA’s workstation and PC gaming chips, the GPU accelerators perform computations far more power efficiently than any machine equipped with CPUs alone.

Mapping tweets in real-time

I blogged recently about TweetMap which is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).  The database can be queried by time, space, and keyword.  The ultimate objective is to be able to query billions of tweets live in real-time.  In this case real-time means from tweet to tweet on a map in under a second.  MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of very large data sets.  MapD uses commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize compute intensive tasks such as querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.  MapD runs on inexpensive hardware  with four GPUs ( ~$1000).

Flood modelling

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas last week, I came upon Myriax Software Pty Ltd, which is a private startup and  which has developed EonFusion Flood, which is a hydrodynamic modeling package based on a 4D GIS which can run both 2D grid and 3D particle-based hydrodynamic simulations.  This is very compute-intensive stuff and I expected that this was running in the clud on some parallel processing machine.  It turns out it was running on a single GPU on a laptop.  Fllod can be used for river and floodplain modeling, dam break scenarios, designing spillways for dams, and urban flood risk assessment.

Mobile geospatial solution improves data quality at water utility

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas Chris Bodely of Anglian Water which provides water and wastewater services to 6.3 million customers in the southeast of England gave an overview of GIS at the water utilty and in particular their implementation of a mobile GIS. This is relevant for any utility that is still sending paper maps and work orders to the field.

Background

In 1992 Anglian began digitizing their paper maps and drawings.  In 1995 they implemented an AM/FM/GIS solution using Intergraph FRAMME.  Then in 2003/2004 they developed a new GIS strategy, a key element of which was a mobile GIS solution.  At that time field work orders were paper and the process to develop them was manual.  Because it was a  manual, paper-based process, it was difficult to process feedback from the field staff when something was changed or when errors in the records were documented by field staff.  The result was that forms returned from the field were often incomplete and unreliable.  This is a problem that most utilities relying on a paper-based process are experiencing.

Mobile GIS

In 2006 Anglian provided Panasonic Toughbooks to their field staff with a desktop mapping application and facilities data.  The application enables field staff to see as-built maps and other information for Anglian's water and wastewater networks.  In 2012 the application was replaced with an integrated application that includes accces to SAP. 

A key feature of the mobile GIS is that it also enables field staff to record errors and changes as redline directly on the digital map in the field as part of a two step automated process.  The redline is which is then forwarded electroniaclly to Anglian's Central Mapping group.  After reviewing the proposed changes Central Mapping update the faciltiies database with the new information.  Providing direct access to the database has empowered the field staff, who are now taking greater responsibility for the reliability of the data in the facilities database. 

Benefits

Anglian found that the mobile GIS resulted in producitivity improvments across most process areas of 2-5%.  But the biggest benefit was in the area of data quality.   Form completion and quality improved from the low 60s% to the high 90s% over a period of 6 months. This resulted in improved regulatory and statutory data capture, for example, to comply with the Traffic Management Act (TMA), and directly impacts the bottom line, because it means fewer fines for non-compliance with the TMA.  Another major benefit was that empowerment resulted in a happier field workforce

The remaining major challenge is to provide the updated facilities information to field staff automatically.  Currently it is a manual process requring ditribution of the updated facilities database via DVD.

Electricity and Gas User Forum at Geospatial World Forum 2013

I chaired the Electricity and Gas User Forum at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 conference.  There were very interesting presentations from Africa, Europe, Middle East, India and Canada touching a range of topics relating to the application of geospatial  in the gas and electricity sector.

Lead speaker: Geoff Zeiss, Editor-Buildings and Energy, Geospatial Media and Comms

Growing population, increasing urbanization and environmental concerns are putting a strain on existing infrastructure including electricity and other energy networks, water and wastewater, road and rail, airports and seaports.  It is estimated that an investment in infrastructure of between $24 to 53 trillion will be required worldwide over the next two decades.  Governments are increasingly devoting their limited resources to services, so much of this investment will have to come from the provate sector which will drive increased returns on investment (ROI) if infrastructure is going to attract the private investors it requires.  This will focus the construction industry, designers, engineers, architects, and construction contractors on improved productivity in an industry where productivity has stagnated in the US, EU, Japan and Korea over the past decades.  The convergence of building information modeling (BIM), new geospatial data and technology such as LiDAR, and 3D visualization is changing how we design, buld and operate and maintain buildings and infrastructure and is resulting in increased efficiency and reduced risk.  Not only is this trend leading to improved efficiency in the $7 trillion construction industry, but by enabling modeling entire cities it is leading to a more holistic approach to the challenges of increased population and urbanization.

Jan van Gelder, Information Manager, Alliander, The Netherlands

Jan van Gelser gave an overview of how Alliander successfully consolidated four different GIS database and software environments including Smallworld, GFIS, Oracle and DB2 into a single web-based geoservices environment for managing Alliander's gas and electricity networks. Alliander took a data-centric approach that focused on three types of data, thematic, reference, and asset data and made all of these accessible over the web via OGC standards-based (WMS, WFS, KML) geoservices.

Phil Mannell, Director, Enbridge Gas Distribution, Canada

Phil Mannell outlined how Canada's largest gas distribution company Enbridge evolved geospatial technology from mylar plates in 1998.  Enbridge first focussed on core GIS in the early 2000s, he moved to enterprise gis in the late 2000s, and is now treating GIS as a platform, which enables Enbridge to identify new business units/groups and their common tasks that can benefit from a map-based application.  With GIS as a platform Enbridge found that they can rapidly develop lightweight, focused maps and apps to support business processes including conducting proof of concepts and pilots to establish the business benefits.  This results in less risk and shorter implementation durations with from 10 to 15 weeks turnaround time for new applications.

Brian Soliday, Senior Vice President, ikeGPS, UK

Brian Soliday showed how a handheld device incoportating a GPS with earth station support, a laser range finder, a digital camaera and a notepad can transform field surveys resulting in field staff productivity improvement of up to 125 % and dramatically reduced risk through improved safety. Brian enlightened the audience that the mysterious "ike" stands for "I know everything", which is approporiate for this multiple input device.

Harsh Sharma, Vice President, BSES Yamuna Power Ltd, India

Harsh Sharma discussed how GIS is used by a large electric power utility with about 1.23 million customers in Delhi.  BSES Yamuna has leveraged a number of information technologies including GIS to improve the flow of information and implement analytics to create an effective decision support system.  One of India's biggest challenges is the 30% of India's power generation that is lost to aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses.  The most impressive result of BSES Yamuna's investment in geospatial and other IT technologies is that they have reduced their AT&C losses by 45% over 10 years.  Geospatial technologies enables them to identify and track specifically where non-technical losses are occurrring.  This represents about 4.5 % reduction per year, significantly better than the 0.8% per year average for the entire Indian electric power industry.

Andrew Evans, Topcon, UK

Andrew Evans showed how vehicle-based data capture technologies can automate the field work that used to require field workers to laboriously walk pole lines.  For example, the traditional approach to pole inventorying used to achieve about 65 poles/person/day.  With mobile data capture technology Up to 800 poles/hour can be processed.  The type of data that can be captured in this way includes Utility Pole location, Vegetation encroachment, Splices, joint Use, pole heights, clearances, and sag.  Andrew presented results that showed that mobile data capture automation can result in 26% cost savings and more importantly in this age of the aging workforce 55% less time.

Dr Ioannis Manakos, Chairman, EARSel, Greece

Dr Ioannis discussed opportunities for EARSel's (European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories) earth Observation products in the Energy sector.  He outlined a number of earth observation products including land cover, land features, and sea features.  There are many wasy that data is being captured these days including land surface and sea surface platforms for in situ ground and ground truth information, spectroradiometers and imaging spectrometers which acquire reflectance from various surface targets, and both active and passive sensing.  Unmanned airborne vehicles offer a multifold range of solutions.  They offer finer spatial and spectral resolution that can be used to bridge laboratory and in situ methods with with space-borne, wide coverage data.  In the area of space-born sensors, there are a plethora of sensors deployed in various spatial, spectral, and angular ranges.  EARSel offers sophisticated information extraction techniques ranging from simple regression analysis to complicated ray following models. Classification algorithms are available for land cover mapping needs for almost all possible targets and biogeographical zones. Change detection is another important application where the analytical tools are becoming much more sophisticated.  During the last decade about 14 % of all papers in major EO journals address change detection.  Renewable energy is another areas where earth observation data and technology is becoming critical in identifying optimum locations and assisting in forecasting wind and solar power generation.

Eng. Atif A Karrani, Managing Director, E;ectricity and Water Authority, UAE

Eng. Atif Karrani's presentation focussed on the implementation of enterprise GIS by the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority(SEWA).  SEWA supplies electricity, Water and natural gas to the population of the Sharjah Emirate, with more than 360,000 customers.  The enterprise GIS system is used for managing electricity, water, natural gas, communications (FOC), and street light networkd.  SEWA's goal was to enable all SEWA Departments to use GIS technology effectively for improving services to the citizen and responses to citizen’s request.  This translated into a development objective to convert and integrate all available data into a standard format in a centralized data store accessible to all relevant departments. SEWA recognized that implementing enterprise GIS requires planning.  In particular it is necssary to be prepared to identify and overcome organizational and technological barriers.  But their successful implementation of enterprise GIS has resulted in GIS being recognized as an essential building block in SEWA’s application landscape.

Jennifer Oduor, Property Department, Kenya Electricity Generating Co, Kenya

Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) is the leading electric power generation company in Kenya, producing about 80 percent of electricity consumed in the country. Jennifer Oduor outlines some of the ways that geospatial data and technology are used by KenGen. These include geothermal field potential assessment to reduce the risk of expensive, unproductive geothermal wells; geothermal infrastructure planning to optimize the design and location of power stations, wells, steam pipe networks, and other infrastructure; management and monitoring of environmental impacts; conflict prediction and management with local communities to identify, in advance, the areas of possible conflict between the company and local communities due its operations and to plan for ways of mitigating the effects; and land acquisition to aid in providing information for purposes of zoning the land to facilitate purchase negotiation decisions. KenGen found that an important benefit of GIS is the ability to integrate data from a wide range of company sources using location as a common point of reference.

Jasper Roes, Project Manager, Geological Survey, of the Netherlands (TNO), The Netherlands

Jasper Roes described a project called CERISE-SG, which is a public-private partnership (PPP) to develop a foundation for efficient information exchange between different domains relating to smart grid.  The project will focus on several use cases.  The first use case is a smart grid information broker, a tool for mapping information relating to smart grid across domains.  The simplest case involves transformations where there is a straightforward mapping between different terms in different domains, for example, kWh  to Joules. The more common and more complicated case involves transformations with unequal semantics where it will be necessary to develop ontologies to provide a basis for mapping terminologies between domains.

Jene van der Heide and Martinus Vranken, Project Managers, Cadastre, The Netherlands

Martinus Vranken and Jene van der Heide of the Dutch Kadaster, the land registry and geospatial agency in the Netherlands,  described a project to model a square kilometer of downtown The Hague with the objective of reducing and stabilizing energy usage and costs for the entire area. In the study area the buildings are large and mostly owned by the national and municipal governments. The Dutch Kadaster has assembled land registry information like ownership, monument status; building information such as year of completion, surface area, energy labels, energy indices; information on underground networks like heat networks, gas and electricity grids; together with government information on heat pump facilities, energy consumption of buildings, and available building facade area suited for solar panels.  Combining this information provides a tool that the Ministry of the Interior is using to develop the busness case for a new form of energy supply that is reliable, clean, and affordable. The two main challenges have been to translate this information to fit the domain perspective of the Ministry of the Interior and structuring the information so that it can be reused for similar projects in the future.  More about this project can be found here.

Convergence of geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) accelerates

About a decade ago Dave Sonnen, Global Analyst for Spatial Information at IDC, projected that the locationaware market for geospatial services would exceed the traditional GIS market in 2005/2006. The release of Google Earth in June 2005 transformed the geospatial services ecosystem. Today, location-aware technologies have blown past the traditional GIS space in terms of number of users and number of deployed apps.

In sectors such as construction, transportation, utilities and municipal infrastructure, geospatial services are playing an increasingly important role even though it is often not obvious. At a recent Distributech conference, the largest electric power distribution conference in North America, of the 400-plus presentations, only a handful mentioned GIS or geospatial in their title or abstract. But of the 18 companies that we interacted with, only two said they were not using geospatial technology in the organisation. Even those that said they weren't using GIS, were in all probability using Google Maps for market analysis, recruitment or other applications.

To put this in context, the annual global construction spend is estimated to be $7 trillion, about 10% of world GDP. Of this, transportation construction accounts for $1 trillion, utilities $2 trillion, and buildings $2.5 trillion. It has been estimated that between 2013 and 2030, $57 trillion in infrastructure investment will be required simply to keep up with projected global GDP growth. Th is includes investment required for transport (road, rail, ports, airports), power, water, and telecommunications. This is nearly 60% more than the $36 trillion spent globally on infrastructure over the past 18 years.

Over half of the world's 7-billion population lives in cities and this is expected to increase as we move toward 9 billion by 2050. In the future, it is projected that there will be many more and larger mega cities like Tokyo, Mumbai, Mexico City, and Moscow. Cities around the world are beginning to realise that the power that lights up their homes and offi ces comes from the convergence of modern information technology, including BIM, geospatial/ GIS, intelligent (connected) network models for electric power, telecommunications, water and wastewater, transportation, and other infrastructure, real-time data management systems, and 3D visualisation.

Buildings use about 40% of global energy, 25% of global water, 40% of global resources, and they emit approximately one-third of global GHG emissions. Faced with rising environmental issues, many governments are mandating energy conservation measures, especially targeting near-zero energy buildings, an industry that is projected to grow by 43% per year to reach $690 billion by 2020.

Building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial technology have central roles to play in improving the energy efficiency of buildings. Several years ago, in an awardwinning paper at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.

Construction, power, transportation and municipal infrastructure are important sectors of the world economy. Over the next two decades these will see a massive infusion of investment, motivated by economic development and environmental concerns. In addition, as governments find they have less and less money for capital infrastructure projects, a greater proportion of the investment in infrastructure will come from the private sector, which will drive an increased focus on productivity to improve returns on investment. Th at in turn is driving a transformation of the construction industry which is reflected in accelerating adoption of integrated BIM, geospatial, and 3D visualisation, geospatially enabled data management, and vertical applications based on these technologies.

Excerpted from a recent article. 

Graphics courtesy of e7 Architecture Studio and VNT Consulting.

Integrating geospatial into construction: the challenge

I spent most of last week at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) in Rotterdam, which was an amazing event, because of its focus on monetizing geospatial value in vertical industries,  Industries for which there were symposia at GWF 2013 include construction and infrastructure, electic power and gas, mining and exploration, water as a resource, water distribution management, and agriculture in addition to more traditional sectors such as land management, photogrammetry and the environment.

I spent most of my time in Construction and Infrastructure sessions.  There were many absolutely fascinating pesentation on the applicaton of geospatial technology in this sector.  Among the most far-reaching in terms of potential impacts were three or four talks that explicitly addressed the challenge of finding a practical way to integrate geospatial into construction processes.

Value of geospatial information

To put this in context, there is a strong drive in the Netherlands to integrate geospatial information into govenrment organizations.  Geonovum is leading the charge in this area.   By way of motivation there is a very interesting cost-benefit analysis in the context of the European INSPIRE initiaive by Ecorys and Grontmij in November 2009.  The scope of study was the cost and benefits of the collection, maintenance and dissimilation of geographic information, but just within governmental organizations in the Netherlands.  The study did not attempt to estimate the value of geospatial information to society as a whole.  It concluded that over 15 years, the total net benefit to government organizations in the Netherlands would be € 34 million (Ralf Duinmeijer, Joulz ICT private communication).

Cost of poor interoperability

To put this in the context of interoperability and what poor interoperability costs the economy and individual firms, in 2004 in a remarkable study the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempted to identify and estimate the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from inadequate interoperability.  The NIST study focussed on interoperability problems attributed to the highly fragmented nature of the industry, the industry’s continued paperbased business practices, a lack of standardization, and inconsistent technology adoption among stakeholders.  It concluded that inadequate interoperability cost the U.S. capital facilities industry $15.8 billion in annually in 2002, but qualified the conclusion by saying that this is likely a conservative figure because there were additional significant inefficiency and lost opportunity costs associated with interoperability problems that were beyond the scope of NIST analysis.

At GWF 2013 it was reported that Rijkswaterstaat, responsible for public works and water management as part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, has estimated that poor interoperability costs it € 800 million per year.

Barriers to integrating BIM and geospatial

Bram Mommers, who is with ARCADIS Netherlands, set the stage by looking at what the barriers are that are hindering the integration of geospatial into the constrcution process.  (ARCADIS is a large international company that provides consultancy, design, engineering and management services in the fields of infrastructure, water, environment and buildings.)

Traditionally the challenge has been that civil engineering on one hand and geospatial on the other have been different cultures.  The way Carl Steinitz put is that they work at different scales.  Geospatial scientists deal with the universal, engineers with the very specific. 

Bram gave some examples of these parallel worlds. Geospatial folks make maps, engineers and architects make drawings.  Engineers and architects use CAD or BIM design tools.  Geospatial folks use GIS.  The geospatial standard for buildings and infrastructure is CityGML.  The AEC standard for BIM models is Industry Foundation Classes (IFC).

ARCADIS has been involved in projects that integrated geospatial into the desing process.  On the HOV Nijmegen project it was found that integrating geospatial and engineering design in a single database resulted in a single copy of each data element and multiple use.  It simplified communication and increased the quality of the final design.  It also enabled automated analysis of the consequences of design choices with the result that the planning cycle was shorter.   Bram mentioned several other projects that benefitted from the integration of geospatial with the construction process.

Based on their experience with these projects, Bram and his colleagues concluded that there are three main barriers to the integration of civll engineering and geospatial.

• Semantics - for example, different terms used for the me things by geospatial analysts and civil engineers and designers
• Different topology - examples,  (1) geospatial uses point, lines, and polygons; CAD/BIM uses splines, nurbs, and other parametric curves and treats polygons in a different way from geospatial topology; (2) features with location vs objects with location as an attribute
• Data formats - for example, geospatial data is stored in shape files, GML, and CityCML; CAD/BIM uses DWG, DGN, RVT files, and IFC

Mapping semantics

To address the first issue of semantics, a Dutch initiative called Concept Library (CB-NL) sponsored by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), a joint government and industry initiative, has been created with the objective of developed an open, on-line system to map between the terminologies used in different domains.  The goal is a single integrated model for construction (buildings and infrastructure) that would allow design, construction, maintenance and operations to share the same data.  The concept library would be extended to include geospatial.  The overall goal as Bram stated it is

• Ontology for the build environment - multiple sets of domain terminologies mapped on to it
• One language
• Combines geospatial and construction

The impacts of this appproach that Bram sees are

• Store once, use multiple times - avoid redundant data
• Integrated information management - based on data custodians
• Geolocation as a property of an object - in additon to features

Bram listed a number of organizations in the private construction sector that are supporting this initiative.

Privacy and personal geographic data

At the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, Kirk Goldsberry, who is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, gave a fascinatng presentation with the help of two of his students on the topic of personal geographic data and privacy.

According the the Federal Trace Commission, which is responsible for protecting privacy at the Federal level, the 4 holy data types are

• Financial data
• Medical data
• Data about children
• Geographic data

Goldsberry's main point was that the first three are treated as very sensitive and there is a legal framework to ensure these data types are protected.  When it comes to geographic data, on the other hand, there is very little by way of policy or legal infrastructure ro protect personal geographic data.

As an example he cited the iPhone.  About two years ago it was disclosed that iOS devices maintain a database that potentially could be used to track the movements of users. In response Steve Jobs in an email said that "We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false."

Without the user's explicit consent iOS doesn't record GPS location, but does record the location of cell towers and Wi-Fi access points, which can be used to create a clear general track of a user's movements. 

To show what was possible with this iOS database, two of Goldsberry's students voluteered to carry an iPhone (with location disabled) for a couple of weeks.  Goldsberry used the iOS database recording cell towers and Wi-Fi access points to put together maps that showed pretty clearly where the students had been including long distance trips and their daily routines.  For example, one student had travelled to Seattle for a conference and had stayed in a hotel.  The student's location at and around the hotel and conference were not hard to discern.  The student went to a Mariner's game and from the location determined through the iOS database it was very clear that the student was at Safeco Field.

Limited legal and policy protection for personal geographic data

I interpreted what Goldsberry showed as not targetting Apple specifically, but that there is very little policy and legal protection for personal geographical data.

A number of speakers made the point that technology, including GPS and GIS, has moved so rapidly and regulation and legislation move so slowly that for personal geographic data, the horse has already left the barn.  It is too late to close to the door. 

Experiment

There is the risk that hasty legislation or regulation on privacy and personal geographic data could prevent or inhibit the very real social benefits the technology is capable of delivering.  The approach that several speakers recommended is to enable governments to experiment, so that regulation or legislation on privacy of personal geographic data is able to optimally walk the fine line between protecting privacy on one hand, and enabling the social beneifts the technology is capable of on the other.

I commend Kevin Pomfret, Excecutive Director of the Center for Spatial Law and Policy, for organizing such an important conference at such a critical time for geospatial technology.

Providing web access to usable open geospatial data

The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. Tim Berners-Lee, in Government Data Design Issues, is a strong advocate of making raw data accessible over the web including supporting standard Web methods, most critically, searching.

GeoREST

I blogged previously about an initiative called GeoREST developed by Haris Kurtagic and implemented by Jason Birch at Nanaimo for property records that attempted to enable visual browsing of open datasets, support standard search engines, plus enable simple access to raw geospatial data in web-friendly formats such as GeoJSON.

What do users want ?

Brian Timoney has reported metrics and a analysis of  how the public actually uses local goverment web maps. He has also created a minimally viable property lookup service.

In light of this Bill Morris has developed an alternative way of accessing public datasets that he feels is compelling to technicians as well as to the lay public, as an example, a template geoportal for accessing multipurpose public data, specifically, building records.

He targeted his geoportal on two audiences:

1. Citizens who want to access their own zoning information and permit history fast.  These folks can search for address, see buildings in context, and get the basic information in one minute or less.
2. GIS analysts who want to download raw building footprint geodata for urban planning, disaster response or cartography.   Thes folks acn download all the features within the current view extent, in a choice of interoperable formats.

Value of geospatial services to the global economy

Google released a report What is the economic impact of Geo services ? earlier this year prepared by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK.

What are geospatial services ?

Oxera incuded all interactive digital mapping and location-based data,  products, and services in its definition of geospatial services.  This includes providers of satellite imagery, digital maps, satellite positioning signals (GPS/GNSS), navigation devices, geographic information systems (GIS), and geospatial expert service providers.  Digital maps include online maps and locally stored maps, but not hardcopy maps.  Geospatial products and services generate direct revenue for companies such as ESRI, Garmen, or Digital Globe.

What is value ?

The study aims to quantify the impact of geospatial services on the world economy and consumer welfare.  It breaks these impacts down into

• direct effects - revenue generated by firms developong and providing geospatial data, products and services
• consumer effects - the benefits that consumers, business and government experience from using geospatial services from geospatial services
• wider economic benefts - productivity and efficiency improvements resulting in cost savings from geospatial services

Economic impact of global geoservices

Direct revenues

Global revenues from geospatial products and services as defined by Oxera is estimated to be $150-$270 billion per year.  The geospatial industry is estimated to be growing by 13% per year through 2016. [ There are important assumptions that led to these numbers.  The lower estimate of $150 billion/year was estimated using a bottom-up approach based on the Bloomberg BICS classification of companies worldwide and assumptions about allocating the revenue from companies that provide geospatial in addition to other services such as Trimble.  The $270 billion number was estimated by scaling up the US revenue estimated by Boston Consulting Group to come up with a world estimate.]

Gross value added (GVA) is the grand total of all revenues ( from final sales and subsidies minus direct taxes ) which are incomes into businesses.  Geospatial services are estimated to have a global GVA of $113 billion/year, which is about 0.2% of the world's GVA of $70 trillion.

Consumer benefits

Geospatial services provide benefits (not including direct purchases of geospatial products and services) to consumers.   For example, enabling consumers to find the nearest Thai restaurant in seconds rather than leafing through the yellow pages and looking up the location on a map saves time.   Finding the fastest route to the nearest hospital saves time and may actually save lives.

Some of the consumer benefts of geospatial services include time savings, fuel savings, emergency response, education, and competition.

Examples of categories of consumer benefits include more efficient navigation, estimated to provide benefits of  $22 billion/year, and educational benefits estimated to amount to $12 billion/year.  Faster emergency response to cardiac arrests is estimated to potentially save 152 lives/year in the UK.

Wider economic impact

Geospatial services also make users more efficient.  For example, a trucking company that has installed GPS trackers on its vehicles and uses location-aware routng software will be more efficient, delivering items faster and more efficiently.  There are also indirect benefits to the general public in improved safety.  By getting things to end users and businesses faster and more safely, geospatial services facilitate economic activity.

For example, GPS/GNSS is estimated to provide $10 billion in cost savings to the global economy.  Geospatial  services are estimated to save 1.1 billion hours of travel time/year and to reduce fuel demand by 3.5 billion liters of gasoline/year.

Thanks to Dr Bob Austin for pointing me to this.

SPAR 2013: BIM + GIS based facilities management at Denver International Airport

At SPAR 2013 Dennis Rodriguez, Project Manager at Denver International Airport (DIA), and Daniel Stonecipher of Immersiv, gave a fascinating presentation on how they combined a BIM-based design and construction process with GIS  to create a facilities and operations management (FM/OM) solution for managing DIA's infrastructure.

DIA is a small city and managing its infrastructure involves many of the same probelms that utilities and municipal governments have to deal with.  As-builts are unreliable or not existent,  which meant that DIA really didn't know reliably where their assets were.   DIA has nine million CAD files which meant a major data management problem.  Their maintenance program  was dysfunctional because they didn't have the information they required to rationalize it with a data-driven process.  They had a lot of redundant data because of silos of information in different departments using different applications.  The most important impact of all of this was subjective decision making during the budget planning process, characterized by the so-called HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion) problem.

Their ultimate goal was data driven processes that supported predictive maintenance and objective metrics for decision making especially in prioritizing projects during the budgeting process.

The way they addressed this was by a combination of data normalization and business process rationalization.  The swiitched to an integrated building information management (BIM) design and construction process that produced a normalized data stream.  During design and construction the data that was required for facilities management and operations (FM/OM) was collected.  This involved collecting and validation existing data and developing continuous data and process management.  The result was FM/OM ready BIMs (both horizontal and vertical) and current relational data structures.

A critical aspect of their solution was that all data including BIM models was geolocated, which  made it possible to load all the data into a GIS linked to Maximo.  Geolocating all their facilities made it easy for them to organize maintenance work on different types of infrastructure concurrently, so that they could excavate once for multiple utilities rather than different crews reexcavating at the same location multiple times.

Dennis and Daniel said that a number of airports are interested in DIA's solution.  I would expect that universities, municipal governments,  and anyone who needs to manage infrastructure in a campus or municipal environment would find DIA's solution worthwhile investigating.