Web-based Utility Mapping - Integration of Precision CAD and Pictometry Imagery

I was fortunate to be invited to present a keynote at the 18th Annual GIS/SIG Spatial/Digital Mapping Conference in Rochester, NY yesterday.  This was one of the most interesting regional conference I have attended recently.  Attendance was close to 200 and included academics, government, utility and commercial attendees.  There were a number of very interesting talks, but one in particular presented by Rocco Venezia, president of Geotilities, and Scott Hill, SVP of Pictometry, a well known imagery company based in Rochester, caught my attention, because what they described was a hosted web-based application for integrating precision imagery and utility CAD drawings.

Geotilities is a survey company that does a lot of work for local utilties and municipal government.  They have two survey crews equiped with real-time GPS and provide boundary surveying, topographic surveying, construction surveying, control surveying, GPS consultation, and subdivision design and layout services.  They use AutoCAD-based software for mapping.

One of the the key differentiators that Geotilities brings to the table is centimeter accuracy in their surveying and mapping, including storm sewers, waterlines, sanitary sewers, signage, gas lines, telephone lines, cable lines, and fiber optic lines.

Pictometry collects data using high resolution aerial photogrammetry augmented with LIDAR data for digital terrain modeling.

What Rocco and Scott demonstrated is a MapGuide-based application that uses a browser as a client and that integrates precision vector CAD utility network data with precision imagery from Pictometry over the web. There are several very impressive features of this system.  First of all it's hosted, the imagery by Pictometry and the vector CAD data by Geotilties, so that smaller municipalities don't have be concerned with developing their own IT infrastructure.  It's accurate to the centimeter, which is not often found, or to be honest, extremely rare among US utilities.  And utility mapping data can be published directly from the AutoCAD-based desktop to the web.  

A most impressive aspect of this system from a user persepctive is its performance.  As I said it's a web application and the performance for both imagery and vector that I saw was outstanding.  Apparently Pictometry made a major contribution to the exceptional performance by optimizing tiling of their imagery.

Comments

[Arnold]

This is the best product going