One of the distinguishing characteristics of the
MEST conferences, is the daily wrap up where one of the organizers briefly reviews and summarizes the day's presentations. I find the exercise very worthwhile because it gives you a chance to review and digest what you've heard during the day's proceedings. There is also a session at the end of the conference, where the entire conference is reviewed by several of the speakers and organizers.
By way of a little background, MEST is organized by the Bahrain Society of Engineers, so I find it more akin to the infrastructure conferences I attend than a traditional GIS conference. Although it has commercial sponsors, it is non-denominational and this is reflected in most of the presentations. It also tends to attract government people from many of the Gulf states, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.
This year I was one of the panelists for the final wrap up, and I mentally did my own review which I presented as a personal precis of the conference.
Spatial DataOne of the themes that came up repeatedly was the importance of data, and especially of accurate, real-time data. Spatial data now includes not just traditional geospatial data sources but other sources such as architectural and engineering design, laser scanning, high resolution photogrammetry with multiple cameras, and ground penetrating radar. Some of the newer technologies for acquiring spatial date were the subject of several talks including laser-scanning and LiDAR, high resolution photogrammetry, and earth observation satellites. Dominic McPolin of the Central Planning Unit (CPU) in Bahrain and others emphasized the importance of reliable data in infrastructure planning.
Intelligent Models
Increasingly people want to do more than simply prepare maps. They want to analyze and and simulate which requires more intelligent data. For years utilities and telecommunications companies have maintained information about their outside facilities including location, properties such as maintenance records, and connectivity, because outage management, asset management and other utility applications require this information. For example, outage management (OMS) is the primary user of connectivity because OMS typically needs to perform traces to identify controlling devices which may be the source of network traces and to identify customers affected by the failure of a device such as a transformer or pump. The increasing adoption of model-based design for structures such as buildings (building information modeling or BIM), roads and highways, electric power substations, nuclear power stations, hydroelectric plants, and renewable energy generation facilities, means that intelligent models are becoming available for many more types of infrastructure. Government permitting organizations are seeing the advantage of model-based design and are mandating (US GSA) or recommending (Singapore BCA) BIM to support building permit submissions.
Convergence
Another common theme is the convergence of architectural and engineering design, traditional GIS, and 3D technologies which enable what Dominic McPolin called a more holistic view of the built world. World trends such as population growth, global climate change, and increasing complexity of our world are seen as major drivers motivating the broader interest in convergence. Dominic McPolin emphasized that the complexity of modern economies requires a new fusion that will allow us to respond effectively to global climate change and other world challenges and predicted that because of its small size next year Bahrain will be a world leader in developing a new fusion of information and systems or conceptual business architecture that will provide a more holistic view of the national economy.
CollaborationAn important theme throughout the conference was the importance of collaboration between different disciplines such as engineering and business, different levels of government, different government ministries and agencies, and government and the private sector. IT in many organizations is characterized by stovepipes, or islands of information, with limited communications between the different IT systems such as ERP, CRM, GIS, engineering design and others. For example, a large utility or telecommunications firm may have thousands of applications, each running on one of ten or more operating systems, with its own proprietary database, which may be one of nine or more independent databases containing the same information. This problem is exacerbated in government by multiple levels of government, national, state or provincial, and municipal. In this respect small, centralized nations such as Singapore and Bahrain often have a significant advantage, because the problems associated with multiple levels of government are minimized.
Dr Al-Tamimi outlined a vendor-neutral architecture for the integration of different spatial systems within government including infrastructure, engineering, building permitting, mapping, and environmental, that is designed to be implemented in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. A key feature of the architecture Dr Al-Tamimi is developing is that it
includes the full range of spatial information from the very detailed,
engineering precision, large scale to very small scale. He said that integrating model-based design or BIM is a priority and planned as the next step.
Ron Lake, who has developed and has been proselytizing the concept of the GeoWeb or worldwide, web-based integration of spatial information for several years, made what I think is a key point that the GeoWeb needs to be treated as a web of systems, rather than a web of documents. Ron, who is the founder of the GeoWeb conferences, has been a proponent for the integration of model-based design and BIM, which was a central theme of the last GeoWeb in Vancouver, as a key component of the GeoWeb.
New Software Business Models
Several of the presentations at the conference either focussed on open source geospatial software or described projects that used open source software. Daniel Ames, from Idaho State University, gave what I suspect was an eye-opening presentation for many in the audience, outlining some of the advantages of open source software. He referred several times to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) and very generously mentioned Autodesk's initial and continued support for the OSGEO. Dan is the founder of the MapWindow open source project, which has about 250 participants worldwide including 20 committers (developers with permission to contribute and modify code.)
Innovation
Bahrain has announced that it intends to reduce CO2 emissions per capita by 60% by 2014. This will require the biggest infrastructure program (road, water, electricity) program the country has ever seen. Dominic McPolin was unequivocal in identifying the key to achieving this aggressive goal as innovation and he made an impassioned plea to the private sector to provide the technology to enable this goal to be realized.
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